Over time, the term grindhouse became a catch-all genre name to label the types of films that played in these theaters. The movies were outrageous and exploited elements like violence, nudity, sex and taboos because they had to in order to compete with the bigger budgets and star power of Hollywood films.

The films were made on the fly and often times had very little planning or post production. Due to the limited budgets, many of the films were filled with accidental humor, bad acting, poorly written scripts and continuity errors. Results were raw little films that were attempting to be bigger than they were.