1. Get What You Pay For (1970)
Early X-rated movie trailers followed the time-tested exploitation model, promising to show us shocking scenes for our own good, because we need to know what really goes on in the world. In Get What You Pay For, we're promised a peek "behind the camera on an adult-movie set" to "see what kinds of girls work in these pictures." Which is a strange concept, because really, any adult movie shows how porn actresses "relieve their sexual excitement." Where's the exposé here? Still, bonus points to the filmmakers for the baroque synthesizer score that runs under the trailer, and for one of the more accurate titles in porn history.
2. Caught In The Can (1970)
According to this trailer's voiceover narration, this, "the latest masterpiece of erotic comedy," combines "the hilarity of Some Like It Hot with the freedom of today's screen." It also looks like it combines a $500 budget with the loan of someone's prison-movie set. Nearly all the action appears to take place in one cell, where two male muggers dressed as ladies unexpectedly score with their new female cellmates. The narrator goes to say that Caught In The Can has already been nominated for three Golden Beaver Awards: "Best Story, Best Action, and… well, you get the point."
3. Wet X-Mas (Undated)
The production values aren't so sharp on this low-budget, one-room production, and though the narrator refers to it as "the first X-rated Christmas story ever released," the only nod to the yuletide is a tree in the corner. That narrator is what makes this trailer memorable: He unaccountably adopts a W.C. Fields voice, drawling lines like "There's plenty of that white stuff in this picture, and I don't mean snoooow," "Watch Santa Claus shoot his loooad under the Christmas treeee," and "Santa comes but once a year, and he's going to come all over the screeeeen."
4. Lecher (1973)
An ugly mustachioed man sits on a New York park bench reading Swank, which somehow makes him desirable to female passersby—even those pushing baby carriages. "I don't know why they love me like they do do do," Mustache Man says, while the narrator repeats "Lecher: a man given to excessive or promiscuous sexual indulgence" over and over in a progressively louder voice, as though someone in the recording booth kept saying, "What?"
5. Lialeh (1973)
Blaxploitation porn, anyone? This trailer hits all the hallmarks of both genres, including a funky score and double-entendre lines like "It wasn't always easy coming up against Whitey, although sometimes it was fun." It also contains some over-the-top misogyny, including a scene where the hero inserts a carrot into a woman's vagina, then walks out of the room growling "So long, bitch, enjoy your lunch!" He almost tops that gem in the scene where he walks into a white nightclub, tells one posh dowager that she's won the door prize, then pulls out his penis and rubs it on her face.
6. Marriage And Other Four Letter Words (1974)
An American flag waves. A man and a woman run toward each other in slow motion. Someone reaches for a towel to wipe the semen off her belly. "This is the movie the world has been waiting for," the trailer's narrator tells us. "An old-fashioned movie about a boy and a girl." The narrator also insists that the film comes from a major Hollywood studio, but that the filmmakers have had to omit "the company's widely known trademark," because the studio bosses feared "the indignant outcry of little old ladies and other uptight stockholders." What could the fat cats possibly have objected to? Maybe the scene where a man walks in on his wife performing fellatio on a stranger, and the stranger says "If it's any consolation to you, Mr. Morton, she gives terrific head."
7. Sex In The Comics (1974)
Tijuana Bibles come to life as porn actors don papier-mâché masks and prosthetic penises, and re-enact the sexual antics of Major Hoople and Moon Mullins on intentionally sketchy sets. All of this is described as an "erotic fun festival of sex and laughter," but that really isn't the best way to explain the horrifying costumes and grotesque straight-from-the-eight-pagers scenes, like the one where Barney Google sticks his cartoonishly long penis so far into a woman that it pops out of her mouth.
8. Confessions Of A Teenage Peanut Butter Freak (1976)
The title alone sets this weirdo porno apart from the adult videos of today, which usually include the name of at least one sexual act on the box cover, followed by a number. Confessions has more of a counterculture vibe, starting with the unnamed blues-rock jam band that appears prominently in the trailer, and continuing through the mocking depiction of establishment types who use lines like, "Gosh, that would be swell." There's even some vague comment on the energy crisis in a shot of a naked woman stroking a gas pump, intercut with footage of John Holmes doing much the same, only without the gas. And yes, throughout the trailer, there's plenty of judicious and disgusting application of the eponymous sandwich spread.
9. Love Airlines (1978)
"It's here. I've seen it. I've been on it." So speaks the whispery-voiced narrator about this Airport homage, set on a plane that's "one big cockpit." While a catchy, string-soaked pop theme plays, the narrator gradually shifts from blankly describing the action to getting worked up, especially when he talks about Georgina Spelvin ("my cock gets hard just thinking about her") and her scene with John Leslie ("that lucky son of a bitch").
10. Doogan's Woman (1978)
There's apparently some kind of corporate intrigue afoot in this luxe late-'70s porno-soap, though that doesn't explain the scene where a couple gets it on in a bathtub full of noodles. Or the voiceover description: "In a world where intimate relations are as limp as spaghetti, and as thin as rungs on a ladder, what kind of shitpile has he fallen into?" The narrator often seems to get lost in the middle of sentences, winding through lines until he finds a good place to stop. For example: "As the object of her obsession, time will soon run out for Rick Trencher. He will shoot right into her trap, and… checkmate!"
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