There are a lot of comprehensive guides out there for almost anything you can imagine: restaurants, tourist attractions, rock albums…but amongst the myriad of authoritative registries, one subject seems to be curiously missing: “adult” films.
Adult Video News — a definitive trade journal that covers the adult industry — seemed to be the prime candidate to weed through the some 12,000 video releases a year and fill this void. And lo and behold, they’ve done so by creating an extremely far-ranging collection of reviews of the best porno videos and DVDs.
Fresh off the presses, the almost 400-page AVN Guide to the 500 Best Adult Films of All Time includes some 500 reviews, as well as the magazine’s personal selection for its “101 Greatest Tapes of All Time.”
“We didn’t want to put every movie ever made in here. This is not meant to be a totally comprehensive guide,” said AVN president Paul Fishbein. “It’s more like a Leonard Maltin guide, [in that] it’s just a really good resource for people who haven’t seen all the great adult films.”
In addition, there are entertaining and informative sidebars, photographs of new stars as well as classic pioneers, an AVN Hall of Fame list and a comprehensive list of AVN Award winners. And in this day and age of list-mania, The AVN Guide to the 500 Best Adult Films of All Time provides plenty: AVN’s 10 Utterly Outrageous Sex Scenes, AVN’s 10 Bitchin’ All-Girl Sex Scenes, AVN’s 10 Great Gay Movies, AVN’s 10 Terrific Oral Sex Scenes, and AVN’s 10 Sorta, Kinda Funny Titles, just to name a few.
The reviews in the guide were originally written for retailers, so they are gritty and straightforward in their style. Included with each review are production details and other inside information, rarely known outside the adult industry.
From Behind the Green Door and The Opening of Misty Beethoven, of the so-called “crotch opera era” to Gonzo greats like Ben Dover and Jack’s Playground to Fetish to Europorn; every category and subcategory of the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and the first half of this decade are thoroughly covered.
The AVN Guide to the 500 Best Adult Films of All Time is edited by the AVN editorial staff, all extremely knowledgeable resources in the adult filmmaking industry. It is available now from Thunder’s Mouth Press.
“I really like how this one turned out, but I think we can add and expand on it for next year; make it even better,” remarked Fishbein.
To purchase the book, please click HERE.
