JoBlo.com has announced yesterday that, although with a big delay and some financial disputes, the remake of 1980s b-movie classic Chopping Mall (1986) is still on the way. Chopping Mall (1986) might not be the most popular movie of that celebrated decade for horror films and still remains pretty unknown for the big audiences. But the fans of trashy movies have that glorious title on a pedestal. In the film, eight teenagers are trapped after hours in a high-tech shopping mall and pursued by three murderous security robots out of control. Yes, high-tech and robots in a low budget film of the 1980s. Now you see why it’s a classic, right?
Robert Hall, the creator of the very interesting Laid to Rest (2009) and its gory sequel ChromeSkull: Laid to Rest 2 (2011), as well as the underrated Robert Englund vehicle Fear Clinic (2014), is the man who is pushing to get the Chopping Mall remake done. Besides a feature director, Hall has been a constant hard-worker in the horror industry in many creative departments since the 1990s. His expertise in special makeup effects gave him the chance to work in renoun movies like Body Snatchers (1993), Wishmaster (1997), The X Files (1998), From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter (1999), Ghosts of Mars (2001), Quarantine (2008) and The Collection (2012), and TV series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1996–2003), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008–2009) or Teen Wolf (2011–2017), some of the episodes of this last one he also got to direct. With a trajectory like this, I think it’s fair to say the Chopping Mall (1986) sequel is in good hands.
It all started in 2011, when the plan was Robert Hall to direct the movie with a script by Steve Mitchell, the writer of the original film, and Roger Corman‘s wife Julie Corman producing. This project has been on hold since then, but now it seems that Hall has finally the rights to carry on with the remake. In the words of the director himself, “my version of Chopping Mall that I wrote is totally supernatural. Instead of killer robots, they are these mannequins that are possessed by the souls of dead slaves that worked at the plantation that the mall was built over“. Yeah, why not?
While the project is putting together the cash to get financed with enough warranties of quality, Robert Hall is already working on his third installment of Laid to Rest to complete his trilogy about the vicious and superhuman killer ChromeSkull.
For those who haven’t seen the original Chopping Mall (1986), here you can check out its trailer. Looks old, delicious 1980s old, right?
