Twitch-O-Meter: Favorite Grindhouse Experiences?

In August 1989 I went to see "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" in the Scala cinema in Utrecht (The Netherlands). This was a nice but old cinema which I liked, with a much smaller venue on top called Select which was showing "Care Bears 3".

At the counter I was told that a whole school was visiting to see "Care Bears 3" so they switched venues to fit hundreds of children downstairs in the big Scala, and "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" was moved to the attic. I was somewhat disgruntled but Select was also pretty good as a venue and "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" doesn't really need the biggest screen possible.

I enjoyed the movie and left satisfied.

Less than an hour after I left, the floor between the two venues collapsed. Thankfully the children had also left the building. I heard it on the radio the same day and turned white as a sheet.

Apparently the heavy traffic outside had damaged the foundations of the building throughout the years. Nobody was hurt, but the cinema never reopened...

When I saw Izo in theaters while living in Kyoto, I had to go all the way to Osaka to see it. It turned out to be playing in a rundown hellhole of a theater in Tenmmabashi. Halfway through the movie two men in short sleeves and ties come into the theater, and instantly start chain smoking, and trying to figure out what was going on. (An impossible task.)
Added to the experience, on balance.

Less wild, and never dangerous, but with the horrible seats and double features was the Brattle Theater in Boston, where I educated myself on HK cinema every week while I was in college. Wish there was a theater here in Seattle showing movies that way.

Not so much grindhouse I would hazzard a guess. But, theatres in cottage country towns are wicked. Bare-bones. Duct-tape holding together threads of carpet. Christmas lights hanging in front of the concession counter to add atmosphere.
During a summer working at a camp we would pile into Huntsville every Saturday and would linger along the main strip, waiting, until the theatre opened that night. Staff from every camp in the area would invade that theatre that night. We owned. Someone would come in late, "Where are you guys?", followed by a chorus yelling out his 'camp name', "Carp! Carp! Over here!". Bliss.
And, watching Jurassic Park 2 in Bracebridge, with the house lights still on and only the speakers behind working. Dinosaurs bathed in red spotlights don't neccessarily make for scarier monsters.

OK, a far stretch from a real grindhouse, but watching Meet the Feebles at the Princess Theatre in Waterloo, complete with mildew-y smell and perhaps the after-whiff of urine is about as close as I come.

I saw many films at this theatre from high-brow art films to low-brow cheese all through the 1990s.

Again, a strange cinema experience, not really Grindhouse by a long shot, but I'll share nonetheless. Reg Hart's Cineforum in Toronto Ontario usually opened up with a hard core liberal-slash-anarchist monologue from Hart prior to watching banned betty boop cartoons or Nosferatu with a Radiohead or NIN soundtrack. The theater of course was his living room with a couple of tattered office chair, a small library of Cinema books on the shelves and a 16mm projector which Hart would stop whenever he wanted to point something out. Pretty intimate, and you could bring in alcohol from the store across the street. Nice.

Otherwise, back in the 1980s it was sneaking over the fence in Oshawa to use a log and sit with the barely functional hang-in microphones at the Oshawa Ontario drive in. The thing close somewhere in the late 1980s and there was sadness.

Being born in the 70s, I missed out on the Grindhouse experience, but there were some pretty rough cinemas back in the day in Downtown Oshawa, broken seats and seedy clientèle and a screening of THE NAKED LUNCH down at the Mark's Theatre on King Street was about as 'rough' as it got though.

There was a theatre in Paterson NJ called the Fabian which was the closest thing to a grindhouse in my area.It was in a shitty area,reaked of piss&weed and you occasionally saw a hooker giving a guy a blowjob in the backrow.I have fond memories of watching films like Kill Or Be Killed and Galaxy Of Terror there.

KILL OR BE KILLED! YES!!!!

...when is that coming out on DVD?

I saw WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT at the old Sam Eric Theater in Levittown PA. 15 minutes into the film, my buddy Doug and I noticed the rats on the floor. Strangely enough, we stayed and watched the movie with our legs pulled up to our chests. We were too cheap to leave! After the film, we hightailed it outta there. They knocked the building down a few weeks later. I had a lot of good memories there. I saw all of the Harryhausen "Sinbad" movies there when I was a kid.

In the 70's, I used to trek from Napa Valley down to the Mission District where there were a number of semi-grind theaters on the main drag. They played mostly kung-fu movies and the floors were very sicky. I remember one time, a David Chaing film, there was a guy in the front row of the theater eating a very large pizza and drinking beer and laughing hysterically at the screen. There were about 4-6 people in the theater on a thursday afternoon, if I recall. Other great grind theaters were, of course, New York City. I can't remember the name sof them but my biggest memory was NOT SEEING "BlindMan" (hand printed poster advertised it) because the theater was so scarey looking at the entrance. I miss funky movies.

Cool article about this very subject from Time Out (New York) magazine:
http://www.timeout.com/newyork/Details.do?page=1&xyurl=xyl://TONYWebArticles1/600/features/primal_screens.xml

The closest I guess I've come to the "grindhouse experience" would be the late and lamented Golden Princess theatre on Broadway in Vancouver. The sound was mono, but not too bad... and the screen was freaking ENORMOUS. While the projectionist didn't give a damn about showing scope trailers through a flat lens or the other way around, the projection of the feature itself was always as good as the outdated equipment would allow.

The name of the game was cheap double features of first run Hong Kong stuff, frequently of films that had no business being paired together such as the latest ultraviolent Wong Jing rape-themed epic and some cutesy rom-com. A double-feature of the inoffensive PG-level ANNA MAGDALENA and the very violent and gritty BEAST COPS made for an interesting date - we had only planned to see ANNA MAGDALENA but they switched the order of the films, running BEAST COPS first instead... fortunately my date was more tolerant of stab-happy pill-fueled Anthony Wong killing sprees than I'd expected.

Double features weren't always the case, when box-office smash THE STORMRIDERS came through it was shown as a solo feature and tickets were sold reserved seating style, I had to choose where I wanted to sit based on a seating chart. STORM RIDERS was the only time I saw that place truly packed. By comparison, on my third go-round with BIO-ZOMBIE* I was the only person there.

*BIO-ZOMBIE has arguably the most clever split-screen sequence ever filmed. It's classic, inspired, low-budget filmmaking at its absolute finest. It's something Orson Welles would have thought of after drinking way too much Jagermeister, thirty seconds before passing out. I made several return trips to the theater just to see that shot one more time. That shot really ought to be famous.

It needed to be said.

I remember when Colin Geddes ran his Asian Eye screening in TO at a rented porn theatre (the Metro Theatre) on Bloor, and in the mid-90s that was about as grindhouse as you could get. I saw Full Contact and Pedicab Driver at it, but missed the showing of Master Killer where Tarantino himself actually showed up.

Full Contact was shown on hot, sticky summer night with no AC and a box of melted Pocky. Man, those were the days.

Well, my closest experience to a grindhouse was at a cinema that was part of a building which also included a huge icehouse. That place had something close to 500 seats and two floors in the vein of old theaters. However , the ground floor was not opened that day, so one had to watch the screen from a very awkward direction.The experience was also peppered with a few kids that ran between the seats for quiet some time during the second half of the movie. Nobody from the close to 40 people audience seemed to care about them.Also the noise from the projection machine was reaching sometimes levels higher than the sound coming from the speakers that were placed at the ground floor. Oh, the movie was "Nemesis" from Albert Pyun.

The closest to an actual "Grindhouse" experiance, would have to be my regular trips to the New Beverly's Grindhouse Film Festival.
The floors are sticky, the theater is small, the seats are uncomfortable and the popcorn is shit.
But you seriously can't beat a double dose of explotation films and trailers for 8 bucks.

Like everybody else, I'm too young to have actual fear-for-my-life movie memories, but: I saw the Mystery Science Theater movie at a half empty $1 theater (everything cost a dollar: admission, candy, soda, etc.) in Kalamazoo. I think it had those old school plush-and-metal seats that slid all the way back (as opposed to rocker seats.) Half-empty theater like I said, but everybody was really enthusiastic, and it's one of my favorite movie memories, and sort of in the spirit of this thread.