Chopping Mall (1986)

Directed by: Jim Wynorski ("Return of the Swamp Thing" 1989, "Cleavagefield" 2009 - what? "Cleavagefield"? Oh dear, oh dear *adds to list*)
Starring: The least fearsome robots in the world, 80s Haircut People
Plot: A shopping mall in Telford uses classical music to deter unruly kids from causing trouble, with "hilarious" consequences.

Or not.

The worst thing about this film is that there is absolutely no fucking chopping whatsoever. Seriously, the title is a total con. In order, there's a stab, a pinch, an electrocution, a cut throat, a head explosion, a burning to death, a throw from a balcony, a laser to the stomach and another electrocution. But, no fucking chopping. Honestly, they should have stuck with the original title of "Killbots". At least that had a shred of truth in the title. I was expecting limbs everywhere, people chopped in half etc. At least "Shark in Venice" had a shark in Venice. At least in "Wrong Turn 2" they took a wrong turn. At least "Pocket Ninjas" was made by a bunch of wankers. At least in "Boa vs Python" there was a boa vs a python....eventually.

But in this, there is no fucking chopping. A mere sliced thoat is the closest you come to a chop. It would be like having a Steven Seagal film where he shoots everyone, or having Clint Eastwood tickle everyone to death with a feather in the Dirty Harry films. It just doesn't cut.

Does it have anything to redeem it? Erm....it has tits, if that's what you're wondering. Otherwise, no. Like I said, it's got the least threatening robots in film history. The look like short squat versions of the original "Battlestar Galactica" Cylons, crossed with Johnny Five from "Short Circuit", with the threat and menace of Tweaky from "Buck Rogers". Seriously, they're shit robots. Under normal circumstances they look likely to provide a shitter protection service than the Protectron's in "Fallout 3".

Alarmingly, this film came out one year before "Robocop". So I can't help but think that Paul Verhoeven and co. owe a little bit to this film for coming up with the idea of robots that protect and serve.....and then go batshit mental and kill people. Not that the Protector 101 robots in this are anything like Ed-209....though for a simple shopping mall defence system, they're kitted out out like some really high-grade military shit. Something tells me that the US Army probably received some really tame robots with nothing more than tranquiliser darts and a taser.

Of course, something has to send these placid robots mad that would normally leave all staff alone.....and of course it's man's best friend.....Lightning. Yes, in an electrical storm just before closing time some lightning strikes and overloads the system. Of course, lightning has a propensity to turn programmed machines into relentless killing machines.

And this is no exception. That said, your average machine isn't tooled up with laser eye cutters, lasers, tasers and C4 (wtf?) but these lowgrade protector bots just happen to be tooled up to the thin red strip of an eyeball with these tools.

And off they go to kill some oversexed kids who decided that having a party in a furniture store after hours in a shopping mall is a good fucking idea. A party of 8. Woah. Rock and fucking roll. By the end of the party, the three couples are all shagging and the remaining two - the shy nerds basically - are busy watching B-Movies on a TV in the same fucking room as the sexkids. I mean, jesus. Would that really happen?

Anyway, these are the two that survive. You know that because they adhere to age old slasher/horror film cliche that you're safe if you don't have sex, keep your clothes on.....in fact, they're positively virginal at the start but you just know that when they're all happy at the end of the film despite their friends just being slaughtered that they're going to have a massive fuck, get all guilty about the circumstances and never speak to each other again.

Apart from the six sex fiends, three innocents get killed. Well, two really, as one was killed whilst looking at porn. They missed a trick here as he only got stabbed in the neck - would have been so much better if he'd been blinded....

So, how do they kill the bots? Well, they get some weapons from a sports shop - which at this point would have made it really fucking interesting had it been set here in the UK - a bunch of kids get slaughtered fighting three killer robots with badminton rackets, shuttle cocks, golf clubs and cricket bats whilst wearing replica football kits.....*lightbulb*

Basically, one bot gets killed in a lift explosion - and it is at this point that I recognise the shopping mall - it's the same one that was used in "Commando". On closer inspection (ie. wikipedia) it turns out that it was also used in "Terminator 2" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High". So, basically the shopping mall is more famous than anyone in this film.....and infinitely cooler.

The second bot gets electrocuted due to that age old trick of using a mirror to reflect a laser. Brilliant, it basically then goes haywire, kills two of the kids and then blows up. The final bot gets lured into a paint shop by the nerdy girl who has tactically emptied loads of paint onto the floor so that the bot loses traction and can't get out. She then lobs a flare that she hid down her top ages ago at a point that I was starting to get restless.....this then makes everything blow up.

Fantastic.

Or not.

"Shocking Mall" would have been more apt. Chopping....yes, I'm still angry about being hoodwinked. The bastards.

Chopping action: 0/10
Shopping action: 4/10
Hair: 1/10
Overall: 3/10 - Pretty rubbish really. Should have called it "Killbots". Calling it "Chopping Mall" for the purpose of a cheap play on words and not having any goddamn chopping makes me angry. Very angry. Like watching "Contact" for the alien.

Supernova (2000)

Directed by: "Thomas Lee" - aka. The new Alan Smithee. In reality, this was a combination of Walter "Mad Max" Hill and Francis"Model T" Ford Coppola and some other bloke
Starring: Some respectable actors and Lou Diamond Phillips

It's taken me four days to watch this. Seriously. Four fucking days. I started watching this on Thursday, but due to time dilation, time was moving quicker everywhere else other than inside the bubble of me and the film. This caused quite a problem. 10 minutes of the film was actually 2 hours of "reality". And the problem was getting worse as I then started noticing that for every minute of film time, more time was passing on the outside. I got worried that perhaps I'd start missing important things in the "real world", like work, birthdays, Y10K. Only now on Monday have I actually finished it, but that was largely due to coming into possession of a Macguffin that allowed me phase the two pockets of time and not risk missing our sun's own Supernova (okay, I know that as ours is a Class G2 star so will have a red giant stage before shrinking to a White Dwarf, but that's by the by....)

To say this film is slow is a fucking understatement. There are only two things slower than this: a date with Bill Oddie and a holodeck episode in Star Trek TNG. Essentially, there is nothing inherently wrong with the film. It is pretty much a 45 minute episode of Star Trek dragged out to 90 minutes with a half-baked story, more expensive special effects and gratuitous nudity. Which was the only reason that Robin Tunney was in this I feel - she was there to get naked, have sex with two different characters and then get flushed out of an airlock. Her character basically said nothing but showed her tits.

Oh god was it slow.....there is some plot, and it's a solid sci-fi Macguffin based story - some alien artifact that happens to make other aliens superstrong to hoodwink them into taking it back to their home planet/system, whereby it'll blow up and totally fuck with their civilisation. Variations of this type of Macguffin litter sci-fi and have huge stories based around - probably more than you can fit into a 90 minute to 2 hour film in fairness.....but this film skullfucks a good Macguffin harder than the last Indiana Jones film did.

The problem with high budget/high concept space based sci-fi is that it rarely fucking works because the concept ends up being toned down so that there aren't long bits of science to bog the audience down with before something fucking massive blows up with dramatic music playing. "Sunshine" worked by having enough plot devices in and around the core story to keep it going without getting boring. This is just one fucking plodding step after another - it's like a walk through an art gallery with no art and just some nice architecture. Like I said, it looks great. Ship design, special effects - all top notch.

As a slasher film in space it doesn't work simply because the man is powered by the Macguffin. Boring. He's not gone batshit mental. There are no aliens here, so it can't be an aliens in space film. And it clearly hasn't been written into a fictional "universe" with the sights on a franchise. No, it's a standalone film with a high concept and nothing else to salvage it from years drifting in space. A total fuck up (that everyone involved probably admits), and a prime example of why sci-fi films set in space rarely get made.

Overall 5/10: A little generous, but it fucking tried hard. But that's like saying you tried hard to take your pants off before you shit yourself.

Pocket Ninjas (1997)

This is the worst film ever made. That's not me speaking, that's the users of IMDB speaking. For a reason that will become apparent over the next 80 minutes....no wait, 60 minutes because I fastforwarded about 20 minutes of fight/dance scenes that were recycled from previous fight/dance scenes. Yes, this is the worst film ever made.

It's also a kids film, and I strongly advise the authorities to track down any parent that has bought or rented this for their kids or has been present whilst their children watched it and lock them up for a very long time. This is a form of torture that *names of Government agencies and/or terrorist groups deleted* have yet to introduce. This is a form of torture so advanced that it is beyond torture and is probably somewhere in hell. Quite possibly on every single level and something so nasty that even Satan himself can't sit through it.

There's not much to say about this really. I mean, it looks like an 80s home video that was filed away for years and cobbled together 10 years later as some form of posthumous tribute for some poor kid that died. And if that is actually the case, then the "filmmakers" know no boundaries and probably participate in social necrophilia with their friends and family.

The presence of a "real" actor dispels this passing thought rather quickly. Well, when I say "real" actor, it's actually the guy that played "Maniac Cop" - he gets top billing in this piece of shit even though he's only in it in some weirdly surreal flashback type scenes......

....erm, like this one.

Actually, that video and the "VR" ending are the only things that you could consider slightly redeeming. And by redeeming, I mean only for those that would consider a fascist dictator saying "I didn't mean it" as an apology for genocide.

There is a plot to speak of, but I'm not going to speak about it. What's the fucking point? You're not going to watch it, are you? No one is......unless you're totally fucking insane. I only watched it for a joint experiment in mind control and torture techniques. I honestly wish that this film was dubbed in a foreign language....instead, it's quietly dubbed in English recorded in a room with a propensity to echo. The sound FX are about 10 times louder than the dialogue and some "actors" are barely audible....especially Maniac Cop, who only has about 20 words to say anyway which are all fluffed more than a porn star in a gang bang.

I feel sorry for the "actors" that have this as their only film credit, I genuinely do. In fact, I think the girl ninja changed her screen name to a one word name to protect herself and any possible acting career she might actually have despite this....

This piece of fucking shit also has the most ridiculous fight scenes I have ever witnessed.....I mean, who the fuck would fight whilst wearing rollerblades? Not even a pro I'd warrant, let alone some kids in clown masks.And then there's the shaky cam.....I think the makers of this would like to lay claim that they invented it. Personally, I just think it's because that the only equipment they had other than the camera was a cheap 5 foot tripod and for scenes that would usually require a dolly mechanism of some variety they just held the camera in their hands and walked. Everything else is from a fixed position, which I guess is fine if you're having a tense dialogue driven moment, but when you're trying to film "action" (in the loosest sense of the word) it just doesn't fucking cut.

In fact, cut is one thing the director probably never even fucking said in his life.....and this is an 80 minute film that should be 40 minutes long.....seriously. Even in the 60 minutes I actually fucking bothered to fucking watch there was more padding than a warehouse of pantyliners.

TURNS OUT IT WAS ALL A FUCKING COMIC BOOK THAT THE KIDS WERE READING IN A FUCKING TREEHOUSE! Oh fucking hell.....

GET THE FUCK OFF MY TELLY!

Overall: 0/10