Grindhouse Theater: Hardgore (1974)

A young nymphomaniac named Maria is shut away in a mental hospital run by the shady Dr. George and his staff of kinky lesbian nurses. Maria finds every opportunity to indulge in sexual shenanigans with the nurses, but each one she beds dies a horrible death. Every night she wanders from her room, she falls into a dreamlike netherworld of Satanists, orgies and bloodletting! What does the devious doctor plan to do with her young nubile body, and how can she escape her fate?

It's best to look at Hardgore as a low-budget horror film with the addition of extended hardcore sex scenes. The atmospheric mental hospital, darkly lit chase scenes and Satanic sex ritual highlights all would fit perfectly in a regional B-horror movie. The psychedelic tones of the film are interesting, as well, with one particularly inventive sequence showing Dianne Galke (Maria) gliding down a hallway towards a kaleidoscopic colored doorway. The gore effects are appropriately moist and disgusting: a nurse's throat is slit and blood sprays all over; a Satanist's dick is sliced off in glaring close-up; a nurse's vagina is scorched by an electrified dildo; an innocent girl is beheaded as she is taken from behind by a hooded cult member. (excerpt from the DVD Drive-In review)

grind

A grindhouse is an American term for a theater that mainly shows exploitation films. It is named after the defunct burlesque theaters located on 42nd Street in New York City, where 'bump n' grind' dancing and striptease were featured.

In the film Lady of Burlesque (1943) one of the characters refers to the burlesque theatre on 42nd Street, where they are performing stripteases and bump and grind dances, as a "grindhouse".

The introduction of television greatly eroded the audience for local and single screen movie theatres, many of which were built during the cinema boom of the 1930s. In combination with urban decay after white flight out of older city areas in the mid to late 1960s, changing economics forced these theatres to either close or offer something that TV could not. In the 1970s these theatres were put to new use as venues for exploitation films, either adult pornography and sleaze, or slasher and dubbed martial arts films from Hong Kong.

Grindhouse films characteristically contain large amounts of sex, violence or bizarre subject matter. One genre of film featured were "roughies" or sexploitation, a mix of sex, violence and sadism. Quality varied, but low budget production values and poor print quality were common. Critical opinions varied regarding typical grindhouse fare, but many films acquired cult following and critical praise. Double, triple, and "all night" bills on a single admission charge often encouraged patrons to spend long periods of time in the theaters. The milieu was largely and faithfully captured at the time by the magazine Sleazoid Express.

By the 1980s, home video and cable movie channels threatened to render the grindhouse obsolete. By the end of the decade, these theaters had vanished from Los Angeles's Broadway and Hollywood Boulevard, New York City's Times Square and San Francisco's Market Street. By the mid 1990s, these particular theaters had all but disappeared from the US. Very few exist today.