GRINDHOUSE has been relegated to only one showing per day at two of my local cinemas:

AMC Cantera, Warrenville, IL

Cinemark in Woodridge, IL

Man - they don't believe in giving a movie much of a shot anymore. Only three weeks and this great film's pretty much considered dead.

:(

This happened in my neck of the woods last week.

It was airing in three theaters at first (on multiple screens at one of them, if not more), and by week two, all three theaters were down to one screen. By week three, the smallest of the three had dropped it outright, one theater was doing nightly shows at 8:30 PM, and the other was diong nightly shows at 9 PM.

None of the three theaters are showing it now. Closest theater showing it at all is around 40 min. away, and it's also down to one showing a day (7:15 PM).

1st week - 1 screen, full shows
2nd week - 1 screen, 1 show
3rd week - gone.

Meant to say this when it first tanked.

They should have advertised it as "for one week only." Then if it did ok they could say "held over for ____ record week. That's how those '70's bigfoot documentaries would have handled it.

What's to complain? Truly encapsulating the grindhouse experience, GRINDHOUSE emulated its models by quickly vanishing from sight... :)

i found it hard to be believe that Grindhouse isn't making that much money.
when i saw it on opening weekend in Toronto, the theatre was packed.

My friends and I caught it this past week knowing it would be gone. Sure enough, it was moved to make way for KICKIN' IT OLD SCHOOL.

Evidently GRINDHOUSE couldn't kick it old school enough... :)

Where I live there's this group of guys called Exhumed, and about every month or so they go to the local rep house and show two or three exploitation movies. Sometimes they show straightup grindhouse fare. They intersperse trailers, sometimes the prints look like they've been to the carwash and back, there's a free drawing, the whole thing's quite fun. They're showing a triple feature next month starting with BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, which I've never seen on the big screen, I'm like, there.

Don't worry, I'm going somewhere with this.

Sometimes they're pretty crowded, sometimes disappointingly empty (they had almost nobody when they showed ROLLING THUNDER, which I think is the best movie I've seen them screen), but they never have lines out the door. They're not going to start franchising operations, I don't think. Why? Because there's only a certain small segment of the populace interested in loving recreations of the grindhouse experience. I wish there were more, but there ain't. I have friends who like movies and I keep trying to sell them on the Exhumed thing, I try to tell them the experience alone is worth it, but no takers yet.

And this, mind you, with actual classic exploitation/grindhouse fare. I liked GRINDHOUSE, but I'm not surprised it's not making any money. I don't think it has anything to do with marketing, although admittedly this hasn't been the smartest marketing job I've ever seen. I just knew only a small segment of the movie-going public was going to "get" this. The double feature-notion alone probably confused people -- nowadays the only time you sit that long in the moviehouse it's for arthouse fare like INTO GREAT SILENCE. In fact, although the stuff of the movie is the dregs of cinema, GRINDHOUSE is really kind of an arthouse piece in it's own right. To really "get" it, I'd argue, you not only have to have some kind of knowledge of what these movies were, you also have to have some kind of sense of how people viewed them. And how many casual movie fans really have that?

I'm rather surprised it got made at all, truthfully. If I were a movie producer I'd have greenlighted this, because I like Tarantino's stuff and even when he's disappointing me I think he's interesting. But I'm sort of surprised he sold anyone else.

doug

Excellent post, Doug. I didn't attend even one screening of the big Tarantino Grindhouse festival now winding up at the New Beverly cinema in L.A. I love all those exploitation films and had already seen a good amount of them, but even the ones that I had never seen were not enough for me to get out and go. REDNECK MILLER almost, but I still missed it. So what does that say? Even rabid fans of this kind of thing may not be supportive all the time. I should have been there every night and didn't go once.

On the opposite side, I did go see GRINDHOUSE twice for some bizarre reason (and as it now stands, it looks like seeing this original cut in the theater may be somewhat of a historical event considering its re-edited future elsewhere).

I miss those screenings. I'm no longer in the area, and wish I had made it out to more when I had the chance...

I miss them as well, having moved about 4 years ago. EXHUMED shows were always fun. I miss them a lot.

I miss Exhumed, too.
I'm still in the same area, but they ain't. They're no longer in NJ (where they did sometimes have lines outside the door, actually), but PA now. :(

For the record (and the sake of staying on topic), I didn't see Grindhouse. As I'm not a Tarantino or Rodriguez fan, I didn't really have any interest, despite the concept gimmick. I'll probably add it to the bottom of my massive Netflix list eventually, though.

I haven't been to an Exhumed show in years, but I was there for their first several. The very first show (THE GATES OF HELL and ZOMBIE as a double bill as I recall) was a bit of a letdown because a large portion of the audience came there for the express purpose of making fun of the movies being played. Those of us who weren't there to talk back out loud to the screen in order to show off how funny we thought we were expressed our dismay out loud, and by the 3rd Exhumed show or so, that element of the audience had thankfully abandoned the screenings for the most part. I still remember their screening of FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 3 in 3-D with glee, and in an immaculate print to boot. I gotta try and get to some of their shows again, I miss it...

Vincent

Was anyone at the Grindhouse Releasing unveiling of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST? It was the first time I'd seen the film, and it was a wonderful introduction. That thing really *played* in that environment.

Yeah, I was there, though I didn't make the Grindhouse DVD cut. Now *that* screening (surprisingly, IMO) was packed.

GRINDHOUSE doesn't appear to be playing anywhere in Cali north of Sacramento...but I can still catch WILD HOGS anywhere I like.

Ha!

I actually had somebody at work try really hard to convince me that WILD HOGS is a "great" movie...

I wasn't biting.

But WILD HOGS is what the "people" want - not GRINDHOUSE...

And, frankly, I could care less...for me GRINDHOUSE was one of the best movie going experiences I've had since seeing the HOOKER EXTRAVAGANZA triple threat (HOUSE OF HOOKERS, VAMPIRE HOOKERS and HOOKER'S REVENGE) at the Skylark Drive-in Theater in Aurora, IL., back in 1977...

Why have a scantily clad Rose McGowan and Marley Shelton on a motorcycle together, when you can have unfunny over-the-hill Travolta and Allen on hogs? Or over-acting Cage? America has its motorcycle cinema standards.

While the audience for GRINDHOUSE may be relatively specific (and we know who we are)...

I'd like to know just who the hell the audience is for WILD HOGS to make it so dumbfoundingly popular.

Now that's waaaaay tougher to figure...

:blink:

But, then again, WILD HOGS may be easier for the mass movie going audience to swallow...

(I mean there's a big difference between trash and trash...)