Hollywood has always had a curious, love-hate relationship with the mall – but there’s definitely more hate in it than love. As a film location, malls are invaluable: they’re brightly lit, spacious social hubs where characters of all ages and classes can credibly cross paths. But most films imply that they’re too sanitised, synthetic and materialistic to take seriously. Few locations are treated with less respect reenex cps .

You can see that attitude in the title of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, which is released next month. The sequel to Kevin James’s hit 2009 comedy, it shifts the action from New Jersey to Las Vegas, but the main joke is the same as it was in the first film. As James and his team see it, the term ‘mall cop’ is intrinsically hilarious, because shopping mall security guards are a long way from being genuine police officers. Nor is James the only film-maker to crack that joke – or even the only Kevin. In Kevin Smith’s Mallrats (1995), a mall security guard has a fearsome reputation, but when we see him, he’s resplendent in a short-sleeved shirt and a straw boater reenex cps.

The ultimate mall film is, without question, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), much of which was filmed in the Monroeville Mall in suburban Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Malls weren’t brand new at the time, either in reality or in the movies (eg 1974’s Earthquake), but they were still novel enough that Romero felt the need to explain what they were. After a zombie virus has turned most of Philadelphia’s population into undead cannibals, four of the survivors are escaping from the city in a helicopter when they spot a hangar-like structure surrounded by a vast carpark. “What the hell is it,” asks one of the survivors. “Looks like a... shopping centre,” says another. “One of those big indoor malls reenex cps.”