Chopping Mall

 A bunch of young adults stay after-hours at the mall most of them work in to booze and have sex at the furniture store (plenty of beds, you see). Unfortunately, the mall has automated its security with three top-range security robots.

 After a nasty thunderstorm fries their circuitry the killbots, like Johnny Five, turn sentient. Instead of dispensing pat life lessons, though, they instead decide to kill everyone they run across - first the technicians overseeing them, then a janitor (Dick Miller!), then our favorite bunch of horny idiots.

 Chopping Mall is an 80s horror B-movie that never really takes itself too seriously; It includes many references to other films (including bringing in Dick Miller, plus Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov to reference their characters in A Bucket of Blood and Eating Raoul), purposefully bad (I think) lines, plenty of carnage and some gratuitous nudity (courtesy, in part, of genre legend Barbara Crampton).

 What makes it interesting is that one of its many influences is The Terminator; The protagonists arm themselves at a guns and ammo store (called Peckinpah's) and try to take the fight back to the killbots. I don't want to oversell it, as the 'action' parts mostly consist of people just standing there, unloading their weapons. But it's not all bad- plenty of appliances and windows get shot to pieces, and some (very mildly) creative ways are found to shut down the machines for good.
 The running battles and showdowns between the "teens" and the robots have always made this one stick out for me - it's a collection of clichés and mediocre writing that nonetheless manages to stumble into a fairly unique take; Add to that some fun lines and one truly phenomenal headsplosion and you've got a very '80s B-movie that, despite some pacing issues, works pretty well. Good cheesy fun.

 Jim Wirnoski, the co-writer and director, got a start with Roger Corman and his wife - I've actually seen a couple of his movies (Deathstalker 2, Transylvania Twist), but this one's easily better than any of those. The guy's put out more than 150 movies since - unfortunately most of them seem to be softcore trash with titles like "The Witches of Breastwick" or "The Bare Wench Project". I have to admit "The Da Vinci Coed" made me laugh, though. Good one.