grindhouse

[ grahynd-hous ]

noun

, Slang.

1. Also grind house. a burlesque house, especially one providing continuous entertainment at reduced prices.
2. a movie theater with inexpensive admission pricing that shows low-budget films one after another, throughout the day and all or most of the night.

adjective

, Slang.

1. of or relating to the low-budget films shown in these theaters, as exploitation films or B-movies: His art films have a cheap grindhouse aesthetic.

   It’s an old grindhouse flick with cannibals hunting teens through an abandoned warehouse.

   His art films have a cheap grindhouse aesthetic.

grindhouse

/ ˈɡraɪndˌhaʊs /

noun

1. 1. a cinema specializing in violent or exploitative films such as martial arts movies from Japan and Hong Kong
   2. ( as modifier )

      a grindhouse film

Word History and Origins

Origin of grindhouse¹

First recorded in 1920–25; grind ( def ) (in the combined sense “to operate an early movie projector by turning a handle or crank” and “a low-budget film that a studio grinds out”) + house ( def )

Example Sentences

He didn’t just passively watch the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone or the grindhouse films of the 1970s, he dissected them scene by scene.

From BBC

And several boutique home media labels, including Arrow Video, Blue Underground, Grindhouse Releasing, Something Weird and Vinegar Syndrome, have made their most popular titles available for subscribers.

From New York Times

Eli Roth’s holiday slasher began as a fake trailer, sandwiched between Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s segments of the 2007 exploitation movie valentine “Grindhouse.”

From New York Times

Expanding on his fake trailer from “Grindhouse,” the director returns to a subgenre he knows well, the high-school slasher, with perfunctory, uneven results.

From Los Angeles Times

The origin of this seasonal slasher is in an ersatz trailer the horror filmmaker Eli Roth made for the portmanteau movie “Grindhouse” in 2007.

From New York Times