grindhouse film

  a grindhouse originally signified a burlesque, strip-tease theatre (for "bumps and grinds") in a red-light district, or a blue-collar downtown cinema-house that featured racy films, chopsocky films, or other marginal fare; as a film, it 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 60s or 70s; 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-Movie, exploitation film or trash films, slasher film, blaxploitation film

  Examples: any of the early gore, slasher, or splatter films (Blood Feast (1963), 2000 Maniacs (1964), I Spit On Your Grave (1978), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)), cheesy spaghetti westerns, biker films, blaxploitation films (Superfly (1972), Coffy (1973), Dolemite (1975)), revenge melodramas, early exploitation films such as the shockumentary Mondo Cane (1962), kung fu (The Street Fighter (1974)), smutty soft-core sex films (Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966), Therese and Isabelle (1968)), women in prison films (Caged Heat (1974)), and the films of Ed Wood, Jr.; a modern-day example: From Dusk Till Dawn (1996); Tarantino has claimed his recent opus Kill Bill, Vols. I and II (2003-4) is sort of a mega-grindhouse epic, as is Grindhouse (2007) by Robert Rodriguez