Grindhouse - April 6, 2007

Quentin Taratino & Robert Rodriguez take us back to the era of the "grindhouse".

A grindhouse is an American term for a theater that mainly showed exploitation films, or is an often misused term to describe the genre of films that played in such theatres (which are actually "exploitation films"). Grind-houses were known for non-stop, triple-bill programs of B movies, usually consisting of a double feature where two films were shown back to back. Many of these inner-city theatres formerly featured burlesque shows which featured "bump and grind" dancing, leading to the term "grind-house." Beginning in the late 1960s and especially during the 1970s, the subject matter of exploitation films shown in these theaters often included explicit sex, violence, bizarre or perverse plot points, and other taboo content. Many grind-houses were exclusively pornographic.

By the 1980s, home video threatened to render the grind-house obsolete. By the end of the decade, these theaters had vanished from Los Angeles's Broadway and Hollywood Boulevard, New York City's Times Square and San Francisco's Market Street. By the mid-1990s, these particular theaters had completely disappeared from the United States.

I never got the chance to experience this first hand but from what I've researched it seems like this movie is gonna be a wild ride.
I found a DVD on Amazon.com called 42nd Street Forever Vol 1 that has 40+ of these old grindhouse trailers that should be fun to watch and help me understand where Rodriguez & Taratino are getting their inspiration for this amazing movie.

Check out the website at www.grindhousemovie.net

I'll post more about the two films (Taratino's Death Proof & Rodriguez's Planet Terror) later