When it comes to generating buzz for a movie, nobody can hype it quite like Tarantino. His latest project, Grindhouse, is a three-hour double bill made with best buddy Robert Rodriguez. Planet Terror, directed by Rodriguez and Death Proof, by Tarantino, promise to recapture the naughty buzz of the exploitation movie, the grungy sex and cheesy violence cheapo flicks Tarantino grew up on and which have long since disappeared from the dingy cinemas on the outskirts of town. You know the ones I'm talking about: low-budget films such as The Blood Spattered Bride, Cannibal Holocaust and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Crazy Mixed-up Zombies.

A Tarantino release is a big event on the movie calendar, but something went terribly wrong when the film was released recently. It tanked in the US, taking in just $11.6m on its opening weekend. Its Irish release, scheduled for 1 June, has now been canned, with talk that the double bill is to be sawn in two and promoted as separate movies. Harvey Weinstein, who executive produced the movie, said "I don't think people understood what we were doing." The Grindhouse freak show has ground to a halt.

But could this be a case of the emperor's new clothes? Because if it's trashy movies you want, and torture, violence, sadism, sex and casual misogyny is your bag, then you don't have to sneak into an out-oftown flea-pit to get your fix. You just have to pop in to your local cineplex where the spirit of the B movie is alive and very unwell.

Just look at the 'splat pack', a bunch of young movie makers whose DIY ethic and love of power tools has nothing to do with home refurbishment.

They have made box-office gold with their lo-fi, cheesy horror films. Directors such as Eli Roth (Hostel), James Wan (the Saw series), Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes) and Rob Zombie (House of 1000 Corpses) have been plugging straight into the depraved minds of adolescent boys and making big bucks from very modest budgets. Roth's 2005 film Hostel, dubbed 'torture porn' by an influential US critic, involves the blatant misuse of a power drill, a girl having her faced melted with a blow torch and her eye removed with a scissors. It was made for $4m but grossed $80m worldwide. And that's nothing compared to its DVD release which so far has raked in $180m. Meanwhile, zombie movies have creaked back into fashion, with zombie supremo George A Romero (Night of the Living Dead) exhuming his career to make the grisly Land of the Dead in 2005.

Arthouse movies too are keeping the spirit of the B movie alive. The films of French bad boy Gasper Noe have a thematic bent of violence, revenge, rape, pornography and misogyny. His most controversial film, 2002's Irreversible was a superb exercise in trash disguised as art. One scene showed a character played by Monica Bellucci being brutally raped for nine minutes. It prompted mass walkouts, while another stomach-turning scene showed a man's head being bashed to a melony pulp by the butt of a fire extinguisher. In Asia too, extreme cinema has even garnered prizes. Park Chan-wook's Oldboy (which was a recent figure of speculation as the film that may have influenced the Virginia Tech gunman), won the prestigious Grand Prix at Cannes in 2004. And the plot of this arthouse film contained what exactly?

Dental torture, skull hammering and a man having his tongue sliced out. Maybe Quentin Tarantino should get out a bit more.