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.