Stage 32 Glossary

grindhouse

Grindhouse is originally signified a burlesque, strip-tease theatre (for "bumps and grinds") in a redlight district, or a blue-collar downtown cinema-house that featured racy films, chopsocky films, or another marginal fare. As a film, grindhouse first referred to a cheap, low-budget, non-mainstream, sleazy, hard-core film that played in an "adults-only" venue, scruffy downtown area or drive-in in the 1960s or 1970s. Early topics included nudist pictures, kung-fu flicks, and cheesy/sexy potboilers, but then branched out to refer to any genre of film with little plot, but with lots of action, sex and nudity, violence, taboo drug-use, lewdness, atrocities, Hong Kong martial arts content, or just plain weirdness. See also "B-movies," "exploitation," "trash films," "slasher films," or "blaxploitation films."