Back in ’07, Robert Rodriguez and Quinten Tarantino joined forces for an ambitious theatrical experiment. Grindhouse was a double feature of exploitation films that ran together on a single ticket. Holding these two films together was a series of fake trailers that completed the retro marathon’s vintage experience.

The hype for this dirty celluloid love fest rose to some pretty serious highest, prompting a contest that capitalized on the fake trailer angle. Contestants were asked to create a fake grindhouse-esque trailer in a similar style to those that were going to appear in the movie. The eventual winner of this contest was director Jason Eisener and his entry Hobo With A Shotgun.

Winning in equal parts because of the absurd simplicity of it’s premise and the skill with which the Canadian director was able to recreate the esthetic of low budget ’70s era exploitation films, Hobo With a Shotgun became an instant fan favorite and talks began to surface about expanding the trailer into a full feature. Now 4 years (and one Rutger Hauer) later Hobo With a Shotgun is a full length feature that lives up to all of the promise the original trailer hinted at.

Grindhouse is a term used to describe a movie theater that specialized in showing Exploitation movies, primarily in the 1970s.  That type of movie was often made on the cheap, and contained salicious subject matter like nudity, drugs, or taboo behavior.

In 2007, Director Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino brought us the Grindhouse double-feature, which consisted of Planet Terror and Death Proof.  The film itself was scratched up to replicate what a real grindhouse might have looked like.  The movie(s) were heavy on the gore, nudity, and camp, just like the old days.

The movie featured fake trailers for upcoming films, one of which was for a movie called Machete, featuring grizzled character actor Danny Trejo.  Rodriquez decided to flesh out the ideas behind the trailer and dusted off a script he wrote in 1993 to give the film the full feature treatment.

Machete (pronounced throughout the film as Ma-chet-ay) is the moniker given to an ex federale  from Mexico who witnessed horrible atrocities committed on his family and has become a vigilante of sorts, vowing to bring down the people responsible for killing his family.  No surprise that his weapon of choice is a newly sharpened machete, though he will use just about any implement in a pinch.