The animated series Seis Manos has a similar grindhouse premise of a kung fu story set in 1970s Mexico and is shown with a similar grainy film filter and simulated projection errors. In the mid-1980s, home video and cable movie channels threatened to make grindhouse obsolete. By the end of the decade, these theaters had disappeared from Broadway and Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, Times Square in New York and Market Street in San Francisco. Another example was the Jolar Theater in Nashville, Tennessee, on Lower Broadway, which was active until it burned down on April 14, 1978. [9] A grindhouse or action house[1] is an American term for a theater that mainly shows horror, splash and low-budget exploitation films for adults. According to historian David Church, this type of theater was named after the “grind policy,” a film programming strategy of the early 1920s that continually showed movies at cheap ticket prices that typically increased throughout the day. This practice of exposure differed markedly from the then more common practice of fewer shows per day and staggered prices for different groups of seats in large urban theatres usually owned by studios. Subscribe to America`s largest dictionary and get thousands of other definitions and an advanced search – ad-free! “Grind House.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grind%20house. Retrieved 18 October 2022. Author Jacques Boyreau published the book Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art of the VHS Box in 2009 on the history of the genre. [10] The estate is also the focus of the 2010 documentary American Grindhouse. In addition, authors Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford published Sleazoid Express, both a tribute to the various grindhouses in Times Square, but also a history of the different genres that each theater showed. The novel Our Lady of Hell is written both as a tribute to grindhouse movies and contains several chapters set in a grindhouse theater.
[11] As grindhouse cinemas were associated with a lower-class audience, grindhouse cinemas gradually became perceived as unsavory places that showed unsavory films, regardless of the variety of films – including later Hollywood films – that were actually shown. [7] Similar secondary performances take place in discounted and neighbourhood theatres; The characteristics of the “Grindhouse” are its typical urban environment and the programming of low-income first films, and not mainly second films that received wide distributions. Due to the proximity of these theaters to controversial sexualized forms of entertainment such as burlesque, the term “grindhouse” has often been mistakenly associated with burlesque theaters in urban entertainment districts such as New York`s 42nd Street,[2][3] where bump and grind dancing and striptease were introduced. [4] In the film Lady of Burlesque (1943), one of the characters refers to such burlesque theatre on 42nd Street as a “grindhouse”, but Church points out that the main definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is for a cinema characterized by three criteria:[2] Ti West`s slasher film X (2022) is a tribute to Grindhouse. [12] Manhunt, Red Dead Revolver, The House of the Dead: Overkill, Wet, Shank, RAGE and Shadows of the Damned are some examples of video games that serve as tributes to the Grindhouse films. Movies shot and shown for grindhouses usually contain large amounts of sex, violence, or bizarre themes. One of the genres presented was roughies, a mixture of sex, violence and sadism. Quality varied, but low production values and poor print quality were common. Critical opinions about typical grindhouse dishes differed, but many films gained cult status and critical acclaim. The Syfy Blood Drive television series is inspired by Grindhouse, with each episode having a different theme. The introduction of television eroded audiences for local and single-screen cinemas, many of which were built during the cinema boom of the 1930s. Combined with urban decay as a result of whites fleeing older urban areas in the mid to late 1960s, the changing economy forced these theaters to close or offer something television couldn`t.
In the 1970s, many of these theaters became locations for exploitation films,[4] such as adult pornography and sleaze or slasher horror and Hong Kong`s dubbed martial arts films. [8] Robert Rodriguez`s film Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino`s film Death Proof, released together as Grindhouse in 2007, were created as a tribute to the film genre. A film with a fictional trailer in Grindhouse, Machete (also by Rodriguez) was later adapted into his own feature film, taking care to include the scene from the Grindhouse trailer (originally shot as a trailer for a movie that didn`t/would never exist). The Canadian version of Grindhouse included an additional fake trailer, Hobo With a Shotgun, which was later adapted into a feature film. Similar films such as Chillerama, Drive Angry and Sign Gene have since been released. S. Craig Zahler`s film Brawl in Cell Block 99 is a modern example of the genre, with his 2018 film noir Dragged Across Concrete. Double, triple, and “all night” bills for a single entrance fee often encouraged guests to spend long periods in theatres. [6] The milieu at this time was largely and faithfully captured by Sleazoid Express magazine. By the mid-1990s, these theatres had virtually disappeared from the United States; Today, there are very few. [when?] Thesaurus: All synonyms and antonyms for Grindhaus Million Dollar Theater in Los Angeles (2012), Mickey One advertising tent and Blast of Silence Grindhouse tents along 42nd Street (New York, 1973) Church states that the term “grind house” was first used in a 1923 Variety article,[5] which may have adopted the contemporary colloquial use of “grind”, to refer to the actions of barkers urging potential guests to enter the venue. [2].