hey it's no problem. Always my pleasure to tell other people about movies I like (and I liked all that I mentioned). It's just that after that mega post, i was hesitant to keep going
I should state that although I've been immersing myself in these films for the past year and a half or so and I've found a ton of great stuff, I'm by no means an expert in the field. I am pretty lucky to be living in a town that still shows these kinds of films on a regular basis though so hopefully these posts don't sound too pompous.
Yeah, not all the films I listed above are "grindhouse" per se... Dirty Mary Crazy Larry made TONS of money if I read correctly, and was one in a line of mega hits for Peter Fonda at that time. Vanishing Point is pretty well regarded by mainstream critics as well as psychotronic enthusiasts. A Film like Willie Dynamite (an excellent blaxploitation pimp movie on par with The Mack) was not only a Universal picture but also produced by Zanuck/Brown, who also produced little movies like Jaws and Driving Miss Daisy. So in the case of Quentin's influences, it's not that he only saw Grindhouse movies but that he saw EVERYTHING.
So, my understanding of the term "grindhouse" is that it comes from the theaters of the 70s, mostly in urban areas, that would run double or triple features, often late into the night or even 24/7, grinding films out one after another while all kinds of questionable clientele went about their busienss, whether it was a junkie riding a fix or a prostitute earning his/her money or a homeless guy sleeping and maybe pissing himself, or crazy film lovers willing to risk a mugging or hold up or have their car broken into for the sake of seeing a movie outside of the mainstream. Probably the most famous example of this was the row of theaters lining 42nd street in NYC. Open all night, some playing porn others playing kung-fu or ethnic films (like The Chinese Mack or Blacula) or whatever. They pretty much played everything just to stay open and keep making money.
In more rural areas, the same type of films played the Drive-ins, also on double, triple, or quadruple bills. So to fill all this programming, certain producers and distributors, needing to fill their orders, made tons and tons of cheap-ass movies. They bought European movies and retitled them with names and posters that were nothing like the film (not to mention 10x more exciting), pretty much anything they could do to churn out product.
Then the theaters and drive-ins would book the stuff because it's cheap, so they may fill out a bill with a Hollywood movie like Jaws with a much cheaper picture like Pirahna, so they could advertise as a 'Don't Go In The Water!' show that lasts all night, or play The Exorcist with Demon Witch Child, or you might see across the street Abby: The Black Exorcist.
A good example of this is Tombs of the Blind Dead. This movie is a pretty surreal European horror film by a spanish director about the ghosts of Knights Templar coming back to kill whoever stepped on their hallowed ground. The ghosts appear in Templar armor and ride horses but, as we see in the prologue, priests burnt out all their eyes as they died so in ghost form they are blind (but not deaf!!!). So someone in America got a bright idea and brought it over, cut out the two or three scenes that lay out all the Knights Templar stuff, record about a minute of narration over a few still shots of paintings explaining that a thousand years ago, a superhuman race of intelligent apes came down onto our planet and waged in intergalactic war with humans. The humans won, burning out their eyes but one of the apes was the lead ape and he vowed revenge. They slap that onto the beginning of the movie, retitle it as Revenge from Planet Ape, and sell it during the height of the Planet of the Apes frenzy. Absolutely nothing to do with apes, but there you go.
So basically, a "grindhouse" movie would be anything that would typically play in those theaters. Before the 60s/70s, they were known as B-movies. Then as soon as home video started all the theaters died out but there was a similar all-consuming hunger for films to fill the rental aisles (and so grindhouse movies eventually became direct-to-video) and nowadays... I suppose you could make a case for direct-to-DVD stuff... and who knows maybe in 30 years people will be going through all of that crap and finding gems in the rough there as well. The general term that I hear most often and personally prefer is exploitation film, meaning the film was made to exploit some proven hit, be it a hit movie (Pirahna), a proven audience (blaxploitation), an in-vogue topic (remember that glut of Australian movies in the mid-80s after Crocodile Dundee made tons of money?), or the good-old standby: sex. The thing was, since they didn't have the budget or the star power to sell their film, they had to do it with gore or violence or sex... things you didn't see in mainstream movies. So that's why so many have awesome names and really great posters and outstanding trailers... Very often the advertising materials for the film were better than the film itself (how can you live up to a title like The Incredible Sex Revolution?)
But since there was this whole other world of film happening, there was a corresponding hierarchy of actors and directors that populated this world. Jack Nicholson for example, was a pretty big exploitation movie star before he got Five Easy Pieces and Carnal Knowledge and became a mainstream star. People know about Easy Rider but how many know about Hells Angels on Wheels and the original Little Shop of Horrors (shot in 2 days!) and Psych-Out? There was a whole group of actors like Adam Roarke and Antonio Vargas and Chris Mitchum who were never very notable in mainstream movies but were kinda kings of the cheapies. And it was the same behind the camera. Now-famous producers like Roger Corman and Sam Arkoff made all these movies with directors like
Richard Rush and
Jack Starrett who made no-kidding really good movies but never got much attention. The "Corman school" roster of directors is now pretty famous. People like Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, and Ron Howard have all gone on to become mainstream directors and have major hits, but they all got their start working for Corman. In addition to those, there are some directors that were just as good but, for one reason or another, never got their break.
Also, something really weird happened in the 80s. It was actually the very late 70s but really became obvious throughout the 80s. Movies like Jaws and Star Wars were basically B-movies with A-movie budgets. Once they made such an ungodly amount of money, Hollywood took notice. and so the 70s ended with their risky choices and original ideas and gave way to the 80s where mainstream hollywood adopted the exploitation outlook. If the first one's successfull, why not make a second? If it worked the first time, why not make it again? So you get movies that were originally very small and cheap (like Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street or Dirty Harry) becoming gigantic franchise hits. And even today... basically B-movies with A-movie budgets... which is a shame because once they got expensive, all the risk and taboo were gutted out of them in order to appeal to the widest possible audience and offend the least amount of people.
That's the charm of these movies for me personally. When you watch a movie like Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, you know that every car stunt in that movie was actually performed by actual people in actual cars. No CG, no test marketting, no studio notes. That's why so many of those movies could never be made today. They are stuck in a period in cinema history where audiences were open and theaters were full and films had balls. There's a movie called Toys are Not for Children that is... SO WRONG... on so many levels. It's just amazing. If you watch it alone, it's guaranteed to make you feel dirty. The shit that happens to that poor little kid in the beginning of Silent Night, Deadly Night... is scarring. That just doesn't happen much any more. People don't walk out of the Poseidon remake and think "i can't believe what I just saw!" but whatever...