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- movies,exploitation or trash films, slasher films, blaxploitationfilms