Chopping Mall - with working title R.O.B.O.T. and filmed as Killbots plus variously known as Robots asesinos (Spain), Shopping (France), and Supermarket horror (Italy) - is a good example of how a certain generation of cullt film fans view the past through rose-tinted glasses. This 1986 American production has been all-too frequently described as a ‘classic’ by people who seem to think ‘classic’ means ‘any film I watched as a kid’. Inevitably, it is unable to live up the weight of expectations that people place on it.

Personally, I caught up with the film in December 2012 (as part of an unlikely triple bill in Nottingham that also included Ken Russell’s The Devils and Frank Henenlotter’s Frankenhooker) and while it’s entertaining enough when shown in a bar and accompanied by beer, it hardly seems more than vacuous, ridiculous fun.

Originally titled Killbots, Chopping Mall is the poor man’s Robocop, with a prototype robotic security system installed in a shopping mall – because who wouldn’t think that giant robots with laser weapons were the answer to loitering teens, shoplifters and litter bugs? Because this is an American horror film on the 1980s, a group of overaged teens sneak into the mall at night to make out. On the plus side, they include cute Night of the Comet star Kelli Maroney and Re-Animator star Barbara Crampton (who once again has a topless scene). On the minus side – everyone else.

Naturally, the robots take as kindly to teenage sexual shenanigans as Jason Vorhees does, and before you can say ‘you have 20 seconds to comply’ they are blasting away at our hapless heroes.

Yet director Jim Wynorski knows how to make the most out of very little, and there is enough here to make Chopping Mall an entertaining waste of time. The robots are entertainingly shoddy, the special effects very much of their time and the deaths surprisingly bloody – there’s even that Eighties favourite, the exploding head! Maroney is perky and likeable as the heroine, the annoying characters all die fairly quickly (take note, modern horror directors!) and the whole film doesn’t pretend to be anything more than what it is. There’s no pretension towards art, no subtexts or hidden messages – this is just straight-forward exploitation cinema.

Guest appearances from cult stalwarts Dick Miller, Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel reveal that the film is hardly taking itself too seriously, and neither should you, This is not great cinema, and neither does it try to be. But with giant killer robots, boobs, blood, explosions, an archetypal 1980s synth score, snakes and spiders all thrown into a running time of just 77 minutes, it’s a good way to spend an evening with a few undemanding friends. Oh, and though the film’s hardly the classic some people have deemed it to be, the trailer is great!

David Flint

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The Colossus of New York is a 1958 science fiction film produced by William Alland (Tarantula, Creature From the Black Lagoon), and directed by Eugène Lourié (The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, Gorgo). It stars Ross Martin, Otto Kruger, John Baragrey, Mala Powers and Charles Herbert.

Shortly after winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end World hunger, doting husband and father, Jeremy Spensser (Martin), is struck down and killed by a car. Jeremy’s father, noted brain surgeon William Spensser (Kruger), is distressed that his son’s gifts will be denied to Mankind and rescues his brain from burial, keeping it ‘alive’ in a bubbling jar of liquid (don’t try this at home) with a view to ensuring his ideas and imagination can continue to flourish, even after death. Transplanting the brain into a specially contracted giant robotic body, he enlists Jeremy’s brother, Henry, to help keep the project  secret. The huge shell is mechanically unreliable and combined with the lack of human contact and affection, Jeremy slowly starts to go mad, gaining immense strength and developing the ability to harness power and unleash it in the form of death rays from his eyes. The madness builds until The Colossus goes on the rampage in New York, culminating in a stand-off at the United Nations where only his young son can save humanity.

The Colossus of New York is one of the stranger entries into the 1950′s and 60′s wave of films with monsters and aliens on the rampage, with a distinctly serious, almost pious tone, due in no small part by the unique score by noted television composer Van Cleave, harking back to the silent era with solo piano creating the mood and tension without the histrionics of wailing theremins and huge fruity string sections.

The morality of the film is hinted at early on; whilst viewing Henry’s latest automated invention, Jeremy asserts, “You create any more like this, you put the human race out of business”. Playing like a modern Frankenstein, advising against Man’s intervention in matters of life and more especially death, the first word’s the Colossus utters are “Destroy me”, despite his creator’s pleas that his ability to continue the work he began in death are more than worth his personal anguish. For the viewer’s benefit, the creation is made appropriately ominous-looking to drive home the point that dabbling is bad; why would any brain surgeon make their son a bucket for a head and Joan Collins shoulder pads?

There’s little to cheer acting-wise; the annoying young son is played by Charles Herbert, also teeth-grindingly whiney in The Fly, and his relationship with his now towering father echoes that shown in Son of Frankenstein. Martin appeared mostly on television, notably in Wild, Wild West and two episodes of The Twilight Zone, John Baragrey (Henry), starred in the first Gamera film, whilst the foolish father is played by the always stern Otto Kruger, also seen in Dracula’s Daughter. None excel.

The Colossus also has political leanings;  he loses interest in his humanitarian mission to feed the world, declaring, “Why create food for the maimed, the useless and the sick? Why should we work to preserve the slum people of the world? Isn’t it simpler and wiser to get rid of them instead?” He adds: “We must eliminate the idealists.” Calling all Communists! As the film reaches it’s conclusion, the Colossus stands before an even larger mural with the inscription from the Book of Isaiah:

“They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

Heavy stuff. Except not really. Good, short (70 minutes) fun with some neat twists on a usually predictable path.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Wikipedia | IMDb

A pioneering slice of British science fiction from 1954 – before Hammer’s Quatermass Xperiment opened the floodgates for the genre – Devil Girl from Mars is something of a curiosity. Too well directed by directed by David MacDonald to be hilarious but too trashy to take seriously, it’s an odd – and very British – take on the genre.

The film takes place entirely within a Scottish highlands inn out in the middle of nowhere, making it also a pioneer in the ‘British movies set in a pub’ sub-genre. The first half of the film introduces the characters – there’s inn owners Mr and Mrs Jamieson (John Laurie and Sophie Stewart) who have the sort of ‘hen-pecked husband / no-nonsense wife’ relationship so beloved in British culture, mysterious and well dressed Ellen Prestwick (Hazel Court), irritating child Tommy (Anthony Richmond) and barmaid Doris (Adrienne Corri), who has moved to Scotland to be close to ex-boyfriend Robert (Peter Reynolds), who is in prison after killing his wife. It just so happens that Robert has escaped, and he turns up at the inn to hide out, employed by the Jamieson’s as a handyman. Unfortunately for him, Professor Arnold Hennessey (Joseph Tomelty) and reporter Michael Carter (Hugh McDermott) also turn up, having gotten lost while travelling to investigate claims of a crashed meteor, and Carter immediately recognises him. But before this revelation can go anywhere, events are interrupted by the arrival of a spaceship, carrying Martian Devil Girl Nyah (Patricia Laffan).

She’s quite the sight in her fetish wear cape and mini dress, black stockinged and booted legs and general dominatrix aura, and when she announces that she has come to take men back to Mars for the purpose of breeding (the Martian men having been rendered sexually useless after a war between men and women), you’d think there would be no shortage of volunteers. But thanks to a miscalculation, rather than landing in London, she’s arrived at a near-empty pub where half the men seem to be pensioners and everyone seems more interested in having a cup of tea.

Nyah does her best to convince them she means business – her ray gun disintegrates trees and tractors, and when she roles out robot Chani – for no obvious reason, given that he does very little – everyone is amazed, including the audience who will probably fall off their chairs laughing at this extraordinarily clunky machine – imagine Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still made from toilet rolls and sticky-backed plastic. Seeing she means business, the men cut cards to see who will have to sacrifice his stiff upper lip and travel to Mars to be used as a sex toy – though their cunning plan is for whoever takes the trip to sabotage the ship and destroy it.

Devil Girl from Mars is nevertheless better than you might expect – though if this is a good thing or not is debatable. Certainly, in the pre-Martian part of the film, things plod when they ought to gallop, with characters introduced slowly and events spelled out by a radio announcer (saving on additional shooting to show the meteor and letting us know who is who before they are even seen on screen). The film’s origins as a stage play are all too obvious. But the performances are better than you’d expect in such a film – old fans and future talents like Laurie, Hammer star Court and Corri ensure that the film never slides into high camp. Of course, the characters are fairly weak – McDermott in particular seems so horrible and arrogant and has such an annoying transatlantic accent that the idea of Court falling for him within a couple of hours seems even more ridiculous than it otherwise would.

The arrival of the Devil Girl livens things up considerably of course. Laffan gives a haughty performances that is perfect for her space-dom character and plays the whole thing as if it is high-art. These moments of quality do ensure that the film never becomes a hilarious Bad Movie, which is a pity, because it has all the right elements – but stubbornly refusing to play along, Devil Girl from Mars is simply too solid a film to ever work as a Good Bad Film, the high-camp of Nyah’s costume and her clunky robot assistant aside.

Still, that’s not to say you won’t get a lot of pleasure from the movie. There is much fun to be had here, not all of it intentional, and it’s better – certainly more memorable – than a lot of 1950s US sci-fi.

David Flint – Strange Things Are Happening

Wikipedia | IMDb

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Autopsy of a Ghost (original title: Autopsia de un Fantasma) is a 1968 Mexican horror-comedy film, directed by Ismael Rodríguez and starring Basil Rathbone (cinema’s most famous Sherlock Holmes), John Carradine (Houses of both Frankenstein and Dracula) and Cameron Mitchell (Blood and Black Lace, The Toolbox Murders). The remaining cast were all Spanish speakers – the film is particularly notable as the final screen role for Rathbone.

Elizabethan dandy, Canuto Perez (Rathbone), roams the Earth in limbo, having committed suicide 400 years previously, doomed to potter about as a ghost in a lonely castle. For company he has his own skeleton, which has managed to separate itself from his person and interacts with him as an individual entity, usually being contrary, and a chuckling tarantula. Perez’s previous life had seen him carousing with ladies without much thought for their feelings and his suicide came as an escape from the Earthly punishment which faced him. A little overdue, Satan (Carradine) appears and offers him a way out – he has four days to make one of four women fall in love with him to such an extent that they would be willing to die for him. The catch is that he mustn’t venture beyond the four walls of the castle and must rely on the Devil to tempt the unlucky females into his lair. Cue much dressing up, a robot and a child who’s at least 30 years old.

The same year George Romero was re-writing the horror rule-book, Carradine and Rathbone had serious gas bills to pay and lowered themselves to appearing in Mexican farces, the horror and comedy of which would already have been outdated by their heydays in the 30′s and 40′s. The pair had already disgraced themselves (along with Lon Chaney Jr) in the previous year’s Hillbillys in a Haunted House but little could prepare them or the audiences, such as they were, for this jaw-dropping mess. It actually starts rather entertainingly, the jokes are passable, the sets are well decorated and it’s huge fun to see three such famous faces in such bizarre circumstances. Sadly, the joke wears thin extremely quickly, a particular shame as the running time is gargantuan for what it is – approaching the two-hour mark. Worse still, so excited are the film-makers, they forget to include our heroes for around half the film.

Carradine later asserted that Rathbone’s death, shortly after filming, could be attributed to the high altitude they filmed at. That, or presumably, he got to watch the film. It would seem that Rathbone and Carradine both read their lines in English and were dubbed, rather than learning phonetically; Mitchell, the show-off, spoke his, like the rest of the cast, in Spanish. Though the few supporters of the film would claim that Rathbone is having some fun in his twilight years, his scenes as Cyrano de Bergerac and reading Hamlet rather smack of ridicule at his expense.

Shot in colour on a budget seemingly stratospherically higher than standard Mexican films, the urge to pack as much in as possible makes it absolute torture to watch, a constant parade of ridiculous characters, none of whom are any real fun or offer anything of interest. Rightly buried, this will never see the light of day officially, there simply isn’t an audience that would appreciate it. You can watch it for free online (see below), though you may feel overcharged.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Big thanks to BasilRathbone.net for some of the pictures.

Highlights of the film:

Whole film online: