50 free Grindhouse trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
In 2007 Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino built a three-hour love letter to the scratched, spliced, sleazy double features of 1970s exploitation cinema. Grindhouse paired Rodriguez's zombie splatter comedy Planet Terror with Tarantino's stuntman slasher Death Proof, wrapped them in fake trailers from Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright and Eli Roth, and then flopped so hard the studio cut it in half for the rest of the world. This quiz has 50 questions on the whole package: the two features and their casts, Cherry Darling's machine-gun leg, Stuntman Mike's death-proof cars, the missing reels, the box office disaster, the Cannes cut of Death Proof, and the fake trailers that later became real films: Machete, Hobo with a Shotgun and Thanksgiving. It also covers the original grindhouse theaters the film was named after. It runs from easy questions for anyone who has watched it once to production and reception details for the fans who own the theatrical cut on disc. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and the source cited under each question, so if you argue with a result you'll at least be arguing with a citation. Play it solo or use it as the movie round at a horror trivia night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Grindhouse (2007) is a double feature made by which two directors?
Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino
The idea came out of double-feature nights Tarantino hosted at his house, complete with vintage trailers between the films.
Q 02Which director wrote and directed Planet Terror, the zombie half of Grindhouse?
Robert Rodriguez
Rodriguez had started the zombie script years earlier during The Faculty, telling Elijah Wood and Josh Hartnett that zombie movies were about to come back.
Q 03Who plays Stuntman Mike, the killer who murders women with his modified cars in Death Proof?
Kurt Russell
Tarantino cast him because he wanted a new audience to see Russell "be a badass again"; Kal Penn and Sylvester Stallone were also approached for the film.
Q 04In Planet Terror, go-go dancer Cherry Darling loses a leg and eventually replaces it with what?
A machine gun
Effects artists digitally erased the actress's real leg and replaced it first with a table leg and then an M16.
Q 05Which actress plays Cherry Darling in Planet Terror?
Rose McGowan
She also appears in Death Proof as Pam, and was Saturn-nominated for the double bill.
Q 06Which studio released Grindhouse in the US on April 6, 2007?
Dimension Films
Dimension was then part of the Weinstein Company, whose boss Harvey Weinstein later said he considered re-releasing the halves separately.
Q 07Grindhouse grossed only about $25M in the US against a production budget in what range?
$53–67 million
Analysts had predicted a $20–30 million opening; it did $11.5 million and finished behind the second weekend of Blades of Glory.
Q 08How did the studio handle Planet Terror and Death Proof outside the US after the domestic flop?
Released them separately as extended films
Death Proof went on to gross about $30 million on its own and Planet Terror about $11 million.
Q 09In what year did the full theatrical Grindhouse first appear on home video?
2010
Early DVD releases split the films up; Rodriguez later said he thought Weinstein "buried" the movie.
Q 10Which three fake Grindhouse trailers were later turned into full feature films?
Machete, Hobo with a Shotgun and Thanksgiving
The three features trickled out over the following sixteen years, the last of them in November 2023.
Q 11According to Rodriguez, whose idea was it to put fake trailers in Grindhouse?
Quentin Tarantino
Rodriguez says he first learned about it by reading it in the trades and thinking, "There are?"
Q 12Rob Zombie said his SS werewolf trailer would be either a Nazi movie or which other exploitation subgenre?
Women-in-prison
He went with the Nazis, citing Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS as the most bizarre genre going, and shot enough for a half-hour short before painfully cutting it down.
Q 13Which Hollywood star appears in Werewolf Women of the SS as Fu Manchu?
Nicolas Cage
Udo Kier plays the commandant of Death Camp 13 and Sheri Moon Zombie and Sybil Danning play the SS sisters.
Q 21Rodriguez first wrote Machete back in 1993 as a star vehicle for which actor?
Danny Trejo
He wanted Trejo to have his own line of "Mexploitation" films like Charles Bronson.
Q 22Before Grindhouse, Machete had already appeared in which Rodriguez film series?
Spy Kids
The kid-friendly Uncle Machete and the blood-soaked federale are, canonically, the same guy.
Q 23Which action star made his first theatrical release since 2002 in Machete?
Steven Seagal
Machete Kills followed in 2013; the long-promised Machete Kills Again... in Space has not.
Q 14Edgar Wright's fake trailer, styled after a 1970s Hammer horror ad, has what one-word title?
Don't
None of the actors speaks, mimicking how US distributors hid that a film was British; Wright scratched the print with steel wool and dragged it around a parking lot.
Q 15Who provides the voice-over for Edgar Wright's fake trailer?
Will Arnett
Pegg, Nick Frost, Jason Isaacs, Matthew Macfadyen and singer Katie Melua all appear on screen.
Q 16In the Thanksgiving fake trailer, the killer stalks his victims dressed as what?
A Pilgrim
Roth's childhood friend Jeff Rendell plays the killer; the two had dreamed up a whole Thanksgiving slasher as kids in Massachusetts.
Q 17The title design for the Thanksgiving trailer was based on a slasher parody in which magazine?
Mad
The parody was called Arbor Day; the trailer also borrows excerpts of the Creepshow score.
Q 18Whose fake trailer nearly earned Grindhouse an NC-17 rating?
Eli Roth
Roth said the ratings board relaxed once they saw it with all the bad splices and scratches; the final film is rated R.
Q 19Which fake trailer, shown mainly in Canada, came from a South by Southwest contest?
Hobo with a Shotgun
Made by Dartmouth, Nova Scotia filmmakers Jason Eisener, John Davies and Rob Cotterill, it became a feature film in 2011.
Q 20Who plays the title role in the 2011 feature made from the hobo-vigilante trailer?
Rutger Hauer
David Brunt, the hobo from the original trailer, plays a dirty cop in the film.
Q 24The 2023 film Thanksgiving is set in which Massachusetts town, where a Black Friday riot turns deadly?
Plymouth
The killer wears a John Carver mask, after the first governor of Plymouth Colony; Patrick Dempsey plays the sheriff.
Q 25Grindhouse was born when Rodriguez and Tarantino found they owned the same poster for which 1957 double feature?
Dragstrip Girl and Rock All Night
Rodriguez suggested each direct one half; Tarantino immediately replied, "And we've got to call it Grindhouse!"
Q 26Which recurring Texas Ranger, first seen in From Dusk till Dawn, appears in both halves of Grindhouse?
Earl McGraw
Michael Parks plays him; his real son James plays McGraw's son Edgar in Death Proof.
Q 27Death Proof gave Tarantino his first screen credit in which crew role?
Cinematographer
Rodriguez had already shot six of his own films; each director served as DP on his own segment.
Q 28What device, borrowed from a beat-up Italian crime film, lets Grindhouse jump straight to the third act?
A "missing reel"
Rodriguez loved that a movie could lose 20 minutes and still work, and that it skips the predictable late second act.
Q 29How long is the extended cut of Death Proof that competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2007?
127 minutes
Tarantino said there was half an hour's difference from the Grindhouse cut, which he'd trimmed "like a brutish American exploitation distributor".
Q 30Which stuntwoman plays herself riding a Dodge Challenger's hood in Death Proof?
Zoë Bell
Bell had doubled for Uma Thurman in Kill Bill and for Lucy Lawless on Xena.