Fear of Technology and Chopping Mall (1986)

Technology is something that people both embrace and fear.  It can be used for some great things.  Vehicles help people get around at a faster speed than ever before.  Instead of taking days to travel between locations, it can be done in a few hours.  Trips across the ocean no longer take months, and don’t involve nearly as much scurvy.  The assembly line allowed mass production so that everyone can purchase the things they want without them (usually) being limited products.  The internet connected people from all over the world so that they could share interests.  Technology brought people together.

Every aspect of technology that has been mentioned is also feared through the ways in which it may be misused.  Vehicles can be dangerous contraptions.  Whether it’s drunk drivers accidentally injuring and killing people through reckless driving, or terrorists using vehicles to cause mass casualties, vehicles can be a major danger.  Assembly lines have caused injuries as people try to repair them.  They’ve allowed poorly produced items to be let out to the public, causing harm before a recall is put in order.  The internet, as much as it has connected people and allowed friendships to evolve, has also been a major tool in radical ideas being put into impressionable minds.

Chopping Mall, also known as Killbots, was a 1986 horror movie that captured the idea of people fearing technology.  A group of teenagers decided to stay in a mall after it closed to have a sex party in a furniture shop.  The mall they were in recently adopted new security guards, a trio of robots that roamed the halls to find any intruders.  The robots were supposed to subdue the intruders through tranquilizers and stun guns, but that night, they were out for the kill.  The teenagers had to try to escape the mall with their lives.  It wouldn’t be so easy, though, as giant metal shutters closed off all of the exits.  Their only way to live was to kill the robots that were trying to kill them.

The robots were that technology that people feared.  From the business side of things, it made perfect sense to bring the robots into the mall.  Maybe having them as well as the metal shutters was overkill, but it made sense.  Having the robots would mean that security guards didn’t need to be paid on a nightly basis to patrol the premises.  The labour cost would go down.  The robots could be repaired during the day by one of the mall tech people that was most likely there.  The owner of the mall made the right choice for his pocket by getting the robots.  The problem was that the robots malfunctioned and began killing people.  The first casualty was the one security guard who was still on the payroll to watch the cameras.  Then the janitor.  Then the teenagers who weren’t supposed to be there.  So, yeah, as good as the intentions of the technology were, it still malfunctioned and people were hurt.

Chopping Mall wasn’t the only movie to ever tackle the idea of technology going bad.  The Terminator is a franchise built upon that premise.  Throughout the franchise, the human characters have been constantly trying to prevent a war against sentient robots.  The first movie had Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese going up against a robot sent to kill Sarah.  The sequel saw a good robot fighting a bad robot that was trying to kill Sarah’s son, while Sarah and her son tried to stop Skynet from becoming sentient.  Every movie in the franchise was about the problems with artificial intelligence.

The Sunday “Bad” Movies have also featured their own fair share of technology gone wrong.  Going back to the beginning of the blog, there was Robot Jox.  The main character was fighting in his giant mech warrior when he was knocked over.  He ended up falling onto a grandstand filled with the audience of the fight, killing many of the onlookers.  It wasn’t necessarily that the technology itself was malfunctioning.  The problem was that the technology was there in the first place.  The robots were only created for the purpose of fighting.  Violence begets violence and there are always victims when violence happens.  Those victims just happened to be people who went to see the robots fight for entertainment purposes.

Steel was a superhero movie from the late 1990s with Shaquille O’Neal in the lead role.  It was based on the Superman series of comics, as the character of Steel came out of the aftermath of the Death of Superman storyline.  That wouldn’t seem like it for anyone who saw the movie, though.  The movie was about a man who made a suit out of steel because he had developed a weapon for the military that was now being sold to criminals.  He wanted to stop the sales.  This was a case of technology being used for the wrong thing.  From the point of view of the military, having this technology could be used to help protect the people of the United States of America.  That wasn’t what was happening, though.  It was being put into the hands of people who wanted to harm America.  It was being given to the people who would cause the most damage with it.  The technology was being given to people who the general population should fear, and thus the technology was becoming a fearful thing.  Steel was a superhero movie, sure, but it was also about how easily technology could turn bad.

A Sound of Thunder took things to the extreme.  It showed that technology meant for good things could cause a butterfly effect style chain of events that would lead to the downfall of civilization.  The technology was a time travel device meant to allow people to visit the past as a sort of nature walk.  There were many rules to it, though.  The people had to stay on a certain path so that they wouldn’t walk upon the ground of the past.  They couldn’t interact with anything.  They could only observe.  That way, they weren’t changing anything.  When someone accidentally stepped on a butterfly, the people returned to a present that was very much unlike the one they had started in.  The technology, which was intended for people to view the past, destroyed the present as they knew it.  It was one of the worst things it could have done, outside of literally destroying the world.

Two years ago, at the beginning of October, another technology-based horror movie was featured.  It was called Death Tube.  The movie was about a group of people who were kidnapped and forced to take part in an online, streaming reality show where they would be killed if they lost any of the challenges.  It took the idea of the internet and flipped it on its head by showing how the entertainment provided by streaming could be used for bad things.  Much like Unfriended, it involved people being connected through the internet and dying in front of the other people’s eyes because of whoever had worked their way into the video stream.  The killer was using technology for their own murderous amusement, and to get eyes on the screens.

Technology can be misused in many ways, and that’s why people are as afraid of it as they are dependent on it.  School, work, shopping, travel… They are only a few of the things that rely on technology to happen in the day-to-day life of every person reading this.  Movies picked up on that need, and they picked up on the fear of advancing technology.  That’s why so many stories are about people using the internet for bad things, military technology being used for senseless killing, or modes of transportation causing mass casualties.  Technology can be abused as much as it is embraced.  That’s the way of the world.

Chopping Mall used that fear to make an entertaining movie about teenagers fighting back against the technology that was out to kill them.  It wasn’t necessarily a scary movie, but it played into that inherent fear that everyone has towards technology.  Specifically, it played into the artificial intelligence side of things.  With artificial intelligence becoming a much more influential part of everyday life, it will be interesting to see if more movies like this come out.  Chopping Mall might not go down as a piece of classic, high art.  Who cares though?  It’s a fun bit of b-horror that plays on some of the elements of the bigger budget, better made movies.  It’s still a good time, even if it might be seen as a bad movie.  Chopping Mall is entertainment.

Here are the notes that aren’t as entertaining as Chopping Mall:

• Other movies that were featured in the post were Robot Jox (week 6), Steel (week 127), A Sound of Thunder (week 169), and Death Tube (week 201).
• Chopping Mall was suggested by @badmoviesunday1, who also suggested Airborne (week 301).
• Barbara Crampton was in Chopping Mall.  She was in Robot Wars (week 37), a movie that might be a sequel to Robot Jox but also might not because there are a few movies that claim to be sequels to Robot Jox.
• Have you seen Chopping Mall?  What do you think of movies that play on people’s fear of technology?  Do you fear technology?  Let’s talk about this stuff in the comments.
• The comments or Twitter can be used to suggest movies I should be watching for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  This week was a suggestion.  I’m always looking for them.  Maybe yours could get into the blog soon.
• My snapchat is a place where I sometimes share clips of bad movies.  If you want to see those clips, add me (jurassicgriffin).  If not, that’s your prerogative, and probably the right choice.
• Next week is coming up pretty soon.  And by pretty soon, I mean in about seven days.  I didn’t plan it too well, since that movie probably should have been this week.  See, for Canada, this is Thanksgiving weekend.  Tomorrow is Thanksgiving.  Yet, I scheduled next week’s movie to be ThanksKilling.  When I was making the schedule, I guess I thought next week was Thanksgiving.  It’s not.  That’s tomorrow.  But next week, I’ll be covering a Thanksgiving movie by watching ThanksKilling.  See you then.

EZ Money (2005)

The Walmart cheap movie bin is one of the greatest treasure troves of bad movies.  Somehow, for a store that seems to be getting less and less selection in physical media (at least in my area), the bargain bin is always overflowing.  Sure, most of the movies are ones that weren’t purchased because nobody wanted them, but there are sometimes good deals in there.  One of the best deals comes in the form of box sets.  The bargain bins always have the sets of eight or ten movies that nobody has heard of.  These movies are usually bad.  They end up being so cheap, however, that the price is almost worth it.

One of these box sets contained a bunch of family movies.  A few of the movies in it were from the same director, Dan T. Hall.  He directed movies such as Old No. 587: The Great Train Robbery, and Lil’ Treasure Hunters.  He also directed EZ Money, a 2005 movie about brother and sister Alex Thompson (Jonas Gustavson) and Molly Thompson (Moli Hall), who scammed an email money scam.  They ended up involved in a government investigation into the scam emails, which brought them and their little sister Echo (Emma Kinghorn) into dangerous, life threatening situations.

EZ Money was filled with many ludicrous things.  The whole movie was a cavalcade of the ridiculous, giving moment after laughable moment of things that could only be in a family movie that no family would want to watch.  Much of that stemmed from the comedy, but there were a few outlying serious moments as well.  The writing was a collection of bits that shouldn’t have been strung together.  There were characters who felt like they should have been in different movies, brought into the same story.  It was an odd movie.

The first thing that EZ Money set out to let the audience know was the characters who were involved and what made them into the people they were.  None were more important than the main character, Molly.  She was a rebellious girl always getting into trouble at school.  At the start of the movie, she was taken to the principal’s office because she had loaned money to a bunch of her fellow students and made a list of which ones to beat up because they hadn’t paid it back.  This was the way she was set up as a con-artist, which would lead to the scamming of the email scammers.

Another character was Jut Monroe.  He was introduced as a biker, going to a coffee shop to get a drink.  While he was at the coffee shop, a man came in and tried to rob the place.  Jut Monroe didn’t listen to the robber’s demands.  In fact, he ended up taking down the bad guy and handcuffing him.  This was before he revealed himself to be an undercover cop.  Unless he was undercover to capture just one thief who was trying to steal money from a coffee shop, Jut Monroe blew his cover for no apparent reason.  That’s not great police work.

Sticking with the authority figures, there was a government agent who became a pivotal figure in EZ Money.  His name was Silas P. Murphy (Mike Jansen).  He was the man looking into the scam emails.  When a power surge was accidentally sent through the city, he was electrocuted and lost all of his memories.  He became an impressionist throughout the rest of the story.  He would imitate people and famous movie scenes to Jut and the children as they went on their adventure.  At one point, he even pretended to be a dog.  Silas ended up being the comic relief for a movie that was mostly comic relief.

The last character that should be noted for their strange personality was the little sister of Molly and Alex, Echo.  Her name summed up her personality pretty well.  In most situations, Echo would simply repeat what the other characters already said.  On paper, that might seem like a cute trait to have for a child in a family movie.  In execution, it was irritating.  It was like when the bully has the best friend who just snickers, says “Yeah,” and then repeats exactly what the bully says.  The only difference was that she was on the good side of things, working with the protagonists.

With those characters set up, as well as the other players in EZ Money, the movie could get going.  And get going it did.  The Nigerian prince scammers tried to scam the principal of Molly’s school, but she took their email and scammed them back.  The government was also trying to take down the scammers, which led to a large sum of money being stored in an online safe called EZ Money.  Oh, look!  That’s the name of the movie!  When the scammers didn’t get their money, they travelled to whatever town everyone was in and visited the kids at home.

The confrontation with the children and the Nigerian scammers led to the kidnapping of Echo.  Molly and Alex took matters into their own hands to save their sister.  Those matters involved enlisting J.J. (Tori Allen), in one of the most obnoxious scenes of the movie.  J.J. was a teenager with a car who could drive them to the places they needed to get to.  Her car had hydraulics, which weren’t needed for the story at all.  Some “Bounce with me” song blared as soon as the car came on screen, and J.J. quickly gave the driving responsibility to Molly.  Of course, a police officer pulled them over because a child was driving the car.  Lucky for the kids, Jut Monroe showed up and sent the police officer on his way by saying that the kids were a part of his investigation.  It was quick thinking that kept the story moving.

When they got to the bad guys’ hideout, the kids needed a way to get in.  J.J. said she could get in and immediately began climbing the building.  For whatever reason, she had the skills to climb the front of the building, get into a window, and toss some rope down to Molly and Alex.  What kind of training did the character have?  What was her backstory?  There wasn’t much to take from her non-existent backstory that could tell why she was able to do that.

At the end of EZ Money, there was a moment right out of CSI: Miami.  It wasn’t the material itself that felt like CSI: Miami.  For the most part, this was much less violent or gory.  It was the way one of the final lines was read that harkened back to the procedural television show.  Jut Monroe, hearing what happened to the money following the arrest of the kidnapping scammers, said “Looks like life,” before taking a pause and finishing with “Just got a whole lot easier.”  Then he put on his sunglasses.  It was a move right out of Horatio Caine’s playbook.

Jut was in a wheelchair during the final scene of EZ Money, due to the events of the climax.  When the police ran into the building that the kidnapping scammers were hiding out in, there was a small fight.  During the confrontation, Jut Monroe was shot.  This single moment of violence felt out of place in a children’s movie.  Even the Air Bud movies, which commonly resorted to dogs being kidnapped, never escalated things into physical violence of this nature.  Families watching EZ Money wouldn’t have expected the hero to be shot and hospitalized at the end of the movie.  That doesn’t seem like a family movie thing to do.  It happened, though.  And aside from the life getting a whole lot better line of hopefulness in the final scene, it was how the movie ended.  Dan T. Hall, what were you doing?

EZ Money might have been the most watchable of Dan T. Hall’s movies up to that point.  The nepotism of using his daughter in the cast was still there.  There were weird choices made throughout the story that kept it from reaching its full potential.  But it felt like Dan T. Hall was trying to do more than he had in Old No. 587: The Great Train Robbery, or Lil’ Treasure Hunters.  He was pushing his boundaries and trying something new, and it almost sort of worked.  He was a director improving with each outing.  EZ Money wasn’t necessarily good.  It was a step in the right direction, though.

If it weren’t for the Walmart bargain bin, Dan T. Hall probably would have faded into obscurity.  Even with it, he pretty much did.  How many people are watching the movies in those ten movie packs?  Not a lot.  For the few that are, Dan T. Hall is a diamond in the rough.  His first three outings weren’t the greatest, but they showed the potential of a solid filmmaker.  Perhaps some of his other movies are even better than these.  The only way to find out is to watch them.  That’s for the future.

These notes are for now:

• Dan T. Hall has directed three movies featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  They were Old No. 587: The Great Train Robbery (week 35), Lil’ Treasure Hunters (week 187) and EZ Money.
• Four actors have been in all three Dan T. Hall movies that have been covered.  They were Ran Burns, Alex Hall, Dan T. Hall, and Moli Hall.
• There were two actors from Old No. 587: The Great Train Robbery (week 35) that came back for EZ Money.  They were Charlotte Battin and Neal McConochie.
• Ethel Booth, Mike J. Ferruzza, Vonda Fuhrmann, Mike Jansen, and Woody Rau all returned from Lil’ Treasure Hunters (week 187) to make appearances in EZ Money.
• Have you seen EZ Money?  Have you seen any Dan T. Hall movies?  Have you heard of Dan T. Hall?  Any of these topics could be discussed in the comments.
• Twitter or the comments are good places to suggest what movies I should be checking out for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  If there’s a movie that you think I should cover that I have not yet gotten around to seeing, let me know.  I’m open to all suggestions, though it might be a while before I get to yours.
• Sometimes, when I’m watching the bad movies I watch, I will share clips from them on Snapchat.  Do you want to see those?  Add me (jurassicgriffin).
• Today is the last day of September, and as such, next month we’ll be diving into horror.  Four “bad” horror movies over the next for weeks.  That all kicks off on October 7^th, when the Sunday “Bad” Movies covers Chopping Mall.  Come back next week to celebrate spooky season with the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  See you then.