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NEWS: Gunslinger Girl, New Anime Block on IFC

One mystery to me is why they're going to call their block "The Grind House?" I don't see any connection between that title and anime or Japan. Maybe someone out there has an idea why?? (^_*)

Grindhouse cinema
Another term is grindhouse cinema; referring to the usually-disreputable movie theaters in which they were shown. Many of these inner-city theatres formerly featured burlesque shows which featured "bump and grind" dancing, leading to the term "grindhouse." The book Sleazoid Express, a travelogue of the grindhouses of New York's 42nd Street, explains that in the 1970s-late 1980s, the etymology of "grindhouse" changed to refer to the operations of twenty-four hour theatres, which would continually "grind out" films around the clock (a reference to the cranking motion required of old film cameras and projectors).

A grindhouse is an American term for a theater that showed exploitation films; it is also used as an adjective to describe the genre of films that played in such theatres. While just about any film that featured excessive sex or violence was typically shown at a grindhouse, the grindhouse genre encompasses films that were unacceptable by the terms of the mainstream: especially brutally violent films, films with bizarre or perverse plot points, etc. Frequent fare for such theatres were low-budget Chinese and Japanese movies, specifically kung-fu and samurai movies, which were known for being exceptionally bloody.

The term grind-house may also refer to a kind of low-budget inner-city theater common in American cities from the 1950s until the 1980s. Having been movie palaces during the cinema boom of the 1930s and 1940s, these theaters had fallen into disrepair by the 1960s. Grind-houses were known for "grinding out" non-stop, triple-bill programs of B movies. Beginning in the late 1960s and especially during the 1970s, the subject matter of grind-house features often included explicit sex, violence, and other taboo content. By the end of the 1970s, many grind-houses were exclusively pornographic and the trashy exploitation movies shown in them were regularly discussed in the fanzine Sleazoid Express.

By the 1980s, home video threatened to render the grind-house obsolete. By the end of the decade, these theaters had vanished from Los Angeles' Broadway and Hollywood Boulevard, New York City's Times Square and San Francisco's Market Street, just to name a few. By the mid-1990s, the grindhouse completely disappeared from American culture.

Man, those idiots at Sundance really do use the "indie" label indiscriminately nowadays, don't they? At least play the Kon stuff or "Mind Game" if you want to include programming reflective of the network.