Chopping Mall by Joshua Millican - Book Review

I read a ton of novelizations, back in the day. Many times I would have read the novelization of a movie before I was able to see it. Which is how my first time watching both Alien (1979) and The Thing (1982) were 'spoiled' by my having done that very thing. It is also why I did not see Poltergeist on the big screen, because the approach of the novelization left me feeling rather underwhelmed.

There were also times when I was caught off guard, because the script being used for the novelization turned out to have been a discarded one. Which was the case of the novelizations for Jaws 2 and The Boogens.

Over time the film market changed, because of home video and such, and novelizations stopped being as ubiquitous as they once were. Novelizations and tie-ins still happen, but they are for major Hollywood fare. Big ticket items. The practice of having a novelization of a lower budgeted exploitation film, as a form of marketing, has shriveled and died.

Until now...

Thanks to boutique publishing labels, and the purchasing power of goofball fans such as myself, novelizations of lower budgeted exploitation cult films are being written and published once more.

While this has been going on for the past few years, it took the release of the novelization for Jim Wynorski's Chopping Mall to get me reading them.

For those who might not know, Chopping Mall was a tongue-in-cheek movie about killer robots that hunt a small group of people that have gotten themselves locked inside a shopping mall. 

Author Joshua Millican adds a little background detail and some atmospheric color to the film's events.

Some of it is good. Like the reimagining of the electrical storm and lightning strike that turns the robot security guards murderous. Or giving the 'characters' of Mary and Paul Bland, who were just cameo in-jokes made by Corman alumni Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel at the start of the film, a little more to do.

But some of it fell flat and did not work for me. Like the de-aging of the primary characters into high school seniors and/or recent graduates. Yeah, no...

There are also some glaring anachronisms, such as having the characters childhood play be influenced by Rambo and Commando. If that were the case, then this story should have been set in 1996, not 1986.

But I let that go. Going in with high literary expectations for a novelization of something as goofy as Chopping Mall is just foolish. This kind of project is critique proof.

Of course I plan on reading more of them. Why wouldn't I?