Aliens at age 14 with my dad. I thought it would be Jaws at a drive-in at age 3, but as mentioned above, it was PG. (ETA: it might’ve been second-run and at age 4 or 5, but it was before I could remember at any rate.)
Jaws was freaking scary. But i didn’t think it was R.
Pretty sure Gladiator.
Extreme violence took a back seat to an exposed nipple when it came to traumatizing the youth of 1975.
Eh, not necessarily. Again, Logan’s Run - nudity, PG. Similarly, Barry Lyndon and Kramer vs Kramer (I looked up those two). If it wasn’t explicitly sexual, nudity was often overlooked as regards to R ratings in the 1970’s and 1980’s, a la the voyeuristic shower scene in Sixteen Candles*.
*They got away with that one because it was ostensibly two younger girls commenting on an older girl they felt overawed by. But of course the scene was really for the young male audience, which as I recall was made very apparent by the director’s comment to the actress at the time (which she apparently was personally fine with, but star Molly Ringwald comes off as less sanguine about the scene).
I remember very well one I didn’t see. Saturday Night Fever. I was 16 and taking my new girlfriend to the movies. I was old enough to drive there, but not old enough to get in (she had just turned 17, and I was a month or two shy). I was mortified. Still have never seen it. But given my dislike of all things Disco, I don’t think I’m missing much.
Kentucky Fried Movie.
Our local suburban cinema did not care about movie ratings or age. No idea of the movie’s name or rating but in some Hong Kong Karate exploitation film, the hero’s sister/girlfriend? is assaulted (raped) by the bad guys. I just did not understand why the kept flashing a couple seconds of a train going into a tunnel.
We definitely saw Saturday Night Fever at the local Cinema, it was probably the PG version because it was not like this theatre got first run movies. So probably my first R movie was actually 76/77 as my brother had not joined the Army yet. We went to a drive-in and saw Fritz the Cat. Cartoon nudity and drug use was mind-blowing for juvenile me. Horatio Hellpop jarred a memory loose for me. Often, the drive-in would do double or triple features and I believe that at least one other Ralph Bakshi film was shown that night, maybe Wizards, maybe Lord of the Rings. Thanks big Brother!
The first R rated movie I remember seeing with my mother was Halloween. When we arrived at the mall theatre, it was still daylight. Going back to the car in a huge parking lot in the dark after that movie was very scary. We both checked the back seats. A year or two earlier she took me to Sherlock Holmes Smarter Brother (though I always remembered it as younger brother). There was a scene where Wilder and Feldman are fleeing down a street with pants on but bare buttocks exposed for reasons. My mother reached over and tried to cover my eyes which I reacted to very negatively because I was trying to watch the film. Not sure why she did that because she was no prude, swore like a sailor and had a very blunt conversation with me about John Wayne Gacy. Wonder if she would have done that if it were two women in thongs.
The first real date I went on was to take her to see Purple Rain. I really never thought about it being a R rated movie until this thread. I have no idea what we would have done if carded. I was sixteen and she was fifteen. Date was still a catastrophe thanks to learning to change a tire in painters pants. She had to show me how to operate the jack.
2004, The Passion of the Christ. I was 16.
When I saw that movie, it was heavily promoted as “Rated X.” That was one of the movie’s selling points. It was an X-rated cartoon. (“We’re not rated X for nothin’ baby!”) But looking at the original posters, I wonder if it actually was rated X or the distributors didn’t submit it for a real MPAA rating and just promoted it as rated X, like live-action porn flicks were. Perhaps it was later submitted and the MPAA gave it an R. It was hilariously dirty but it didn’t really deserve an X.
True or not, “Fritz” was the first “X-Rated” movie I ever saw.
I’ve been told that the X rating wasn’t actually copyrighted, like the other ratings are. A distributor could call anything they wanted to “Rated X.”
I saw “Fritz” and an old downtown theater that was on its last legs by that point. (A few years later the building collapsed!) The first movie I saw there was “The Time Machine” in 1960 and the last was “Fritz the Cat” in 1972, with many, many films, good and not so good, in between. How sadly times had changed in just a dozen years for the grand old lady.
I’m not sure. I thought porn distributors called their films rated XXX because it didn’t infringe on the MPAA.
ETA: I read the wiki article on Rated X and you’re right. It wasn’t copyrighted.
No, I believe XOldiesJock is correct. I know that when the film rating system was set up they registered the ratings as trademarks. A studio could only obtain a rating by submitting their movie to the MPAA, which required a fee. In order to avoid accusations that the MPAA was requiring studios to pay them off in order to release a movie, they deliberately left the X-rating non-trademarked which allowed anyone to skip the rating process (and payment) and voluntarily rate their movie X.
The original intention was that X-rating movies would not just be pornography. The plan was that they would be mainstream movies. There was even an X-rated movie (Midnight Cowboy) that won the Best Picture Oscar.
But alongside these mainstream X-rated movies, there was the growing porn industry and its releases. And these movies were also rating themselves as X.
Eventually, some porn studios began using the XXX rating to distinguish themselves from mainstream movies but that’s not part of the official rating system. There’s no legal distinction between an X-rating and a XXX-rating.
This all became a moot issue in 1990 when the MPAA decided to abandon the X-rating and replace it with the NC-17 rating. The NC-17 rating is trademarked like the other ratings. Studios that wish to bypass the review process now just release their movies without a rating.
eta: I see you did your own research while I was writing my post.
Me too, June 1979, my dad took me to the Carousel Cinema, big ol’ 70foot screen to see director Ridley Scott’s ‘‘Alien’’. No internet back then, we had no idea what was going to come boinging out of that screen. Still 1of the best movie experiences I’ve ever had, bested ONLY by seeing Scott’s 2nd film in 1982- Blade*runner 
My family and I walked out of Robocop after the meeting room death scene so the first complete film I saw in the theaters was Basic Instinct. My mother was like, “This is going to be very scary.” but I knew even at 14 what we were more likely to witness and I wasn’t wrong. There was an uncomfortable car ride discussion afterwards about appropriate sexual behavior I wish I could scrub from my brain.
I think about that more often now that I have young teens.
Also Blazing Saddles, ten years old. After my parents divorced, moviegoing ended up being what my parents (individually) did with me. My father’s third language was English, and so we often went to inappropriate but wildly entertaining movies (Uptown Saturday Night was PG, but that one stuck in my head), but I think this one (and The Longest Yard later that year) were my mom.
The ratings on films is a mark of their time not ours so it can be strange rewatching something with your kids a generation removed. Poltergeist is PG, but both my children noped out of there in the beginning when the girl started talking to the blank tv screen. It scared them not because she’s talking to a tv, but that salt and pepper channel isn’t something Gen Alpha is familiar with.
The parents blaze up in their bedroom also which is a strange off note mark of the post 70’s era for a PG film.
" The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." – William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
It’s funny that a young person reading the book today would more likely picture a bright blue sky because that’s what a dead channel looks like to them.
By the time I was 13 or 14 it was no problem getting into an R rated movie. Cash seemed to work as ID. I have seen most of those movies above. 
I think it would have been Under Siege. I remember being about 13, but checking the dates, I guess I’d have been 15. I went with a cousin one year older than me.
I was expecting a debriefing with my mom when I got back, a discussion about what caused the movie to have an R rating and what my thoughts were on those things, and so on. Instead, it was just “How was the movie?” “OK, I guess.” “OK, that’s good.”.
Neither did anyone at the theater give either of us a second look, even though I don’t think either of us looked 18.
It was all kind of anticlimactic, really.
Ha! We are of like mind, I thought the exact same thing and when I said that phrase to a room that didn’t understand the reference I chuckled to myself. There is a lot of the Cyberpunk stuff that would confuse my children, “What’s a beeper? Why are there phone booth’s in 2100AD?”
I am wondering if Demolition Man may hit the mark for them unironically at this point.