Editorials
Have a Nice Day! 32 Years of ‘Chopping Mall’
Recent news caused quite the stir as it was revealed director Robert Hall was aiming to revive 1986’s Chopping Mall, only the filmmaker’s intent was to drop the whole killer robot angle. Ya’ know…the sole conceit of the original film? Personally, I think Hall is a fine director (Laid to Rest is one of the best slasher flicks of the last ten years), and I’m sure no matter what he would’ve done with a remake, I’d be in line to check it out. But, Chopping Mall is the epitome of 80’s dumb-fun horror. It’s far from a sacred cow, and I think an updated take on the material could be a total blast. A few extra dollars spent on (practical) effects, a reliance on gory deaths, and some cheeky dialogue would be all that I’d ask of a new Chopping Mall. There just had better be some damn killbots up in that piece! Ultimately, however, it seems the ire from fans may have been moot as the original film’s director has claimed Hall does not currently hold the remake rights. This conversation is incredibly prescient, though, as today marks the 32nd anniversary of the killer robots/dead teenagers in a mall flick.
Released in 1986, it’s safe to assume that no one involved thought we’d still be discussing this little slice of bubblegum terror 32 years later. This wasn’t anyone’s idea of a passion project. Julie Corman, working for her husband Roger Corman’s Concorde Pictures, was tasked by VHS giant Vestron Video to deliver a horror film set in a mall. Enter, Jim Wynorski. Wynorski is, perhaps, “problematic” as a person. As a director, he has helmed hundreds of quicky D grade flicks featuring an unimaginable combination of boobs, ass, and blood (Bare Wench Project, The Witches of Breastwick). Occasionally, he directs a film that is not only watchable but a hell of a good time (The Haunting of Morella, Hard to Die, 976 Evil 2, Transylvania Twist…okay, maybe more than “occasionally”). This was only his third go-round as director, though he’d written several titles for Corman and co previously. When he got wind of the “mall horror” gig, the young filmmaker jumped at the chance. Wynorski convinced Julie to bring him onboard by offering his services as a screenwriter on a budget, as long as he was given the job of director.
He partnered with Steve Mitchell (who later went on to write for TV with “Jem” and “G.I. Joe”) to bang out a treatment for their security robots gone bad opus. The duo wasted no time and submitted their pitch only 24 hours after writing began. Vestron Video took the bait and commissioned the film from Corman. Wynorski and Mitchell began crafting an actual script which took them less than five weeks to finish. From there, production moved fast and loose. They shot the film in around 20 days on a budget less than a million dollars. They filmed strictly nights at California’s Sherman Oaks Galleria. They didn’t have the budget to shut the place down, so they had to film during the limited window when the mall was closed at night.
The plot, if you’ve somehow never experienced its special blend of tongue-in-cheek and overly earnest goofiness, concerns itself with a fleet of security bots at a fancy mall that get their wires crossed during a thunderstorm. Built to serve and protect, they end up seeing a group of randy teens who’ve snuck into party after hours at the mall’s furniture store(?) as lethal threats. The bots respond accordingly with deadly force. In typical Wynorski fashion, boobs and blood ensue. It was important to co-writer Mitchell that the kids were more than meat-targets in a body count flick. Unimpressed with the slew of dead teenager flicks of the time, Mitchell wanted to ensure his teens fought back. That simple mission statement helps elevate Chopping Mall from the generic slasher flick the film’s title might bring to mind. Much like Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, these kids have a bevy of options at their disposal within the confines of the mall, and Wynorski and Mitchell ensured the characters got to improvise their defenses using the various tools at their disposal to stand against their technological adversaries. It’s this action element that gives it an almost Die Hard as a slasher flick vibe, a style Wynorski would later build upon with Hard to Die (AKA Sorority House Massacre 3).
The cast was front-loaded with two of the hottest “scream queens” of the time. Kelli Maroney (Night of the Comet) claims she got the role after the original actress hired refused to curse on-screen. Maroney was game for anything. In her own words, “I’ll swear. I’ll do anything you want!” Of course, Maroney’s character Alice doesn’t even drop a single F-bomb or curse word throughout the film. In the words of Wynorski, however, she was hired for a much different reason: “I had seen Kelli in a couple of things, and I wanted to date her. So, I figured the one way to make that happen was to put her in a movie.” Umm…nonetheless, Maroney brings such a spunky spirit to her performance in the film. To explain away her character’s seemingly perfect marksmanship after the kids break into Peckinpah’s (wink-wink) and load up on artillery, Maroney ad-libbed the line, “My dad’s a marine.” Despite the bizarre furniture store orgy and often awkward dialogue, Maroney’s only regret during the production is the excessive camel toe she sports due to the tight, hiked up, 80’s jeans!
Of course, the legendary Barbara Crampton (Re-animator, From Beyond), rounds out the tag team of notable horror actresses to grace the Park Plaza Mall. While Maloney and Crampton might have been the starring attractions of the main cast, a few more notable faces pop up throughout the runtime. “That guy” Dick Miller plays an ill-fated janitor and Paul Bartel along with B-movie queen in her own right, Mary Woronov, both cameo as continuations of their on-screen personas from the cult fave Eating Raoul.
After the lightning speed production, the film was released under the title Killbots…to tepid box office. In a smart marketing move, Concorde pulled the film and retitled it Chopping Mall. While the updated moniker helped rake in a bit of extra dough, it wasn’t until Vestron unleashed the killbots onto video store shelves that Chopping Mall truly began to build its cult following. From food court sized options of favorite quotable lines (“I like pepperoni.” or “I’m just not used to being chased around a mall in the middle of the night by killer robots.”) to THE infamous exploding head, and breakneck pace, Chopping Mall is 80’s B-movie filmmaking at its finest. The film represents a time when movies could be sold based solely on a poster or a barebones concept (“horror movie in a mall!”). The difference is most of those “poster before script” films feel like soulless cash grabs. Wynorski and Mitchell utilized the right level of carefree “whatever works/can do” attitude to a hackneyed premise and delivered a horror film that will be forever remembered, even if the setting on which the story is built has gone the way of the VCR.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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