Amanda Lear is one interesting story.

The French singer, songwriter, painter, television presenter, actress and former model first came to the attention of the public via her image on the cover of Roxy Music's For Your Pleasure. Thanks to her songs "Blood and Honey", "Tomorrow", "Queen of Chinatown", "Follow Me", "Enigma (Give a Bit of Mmh to Me)", "The Sphinx" and "Fashion Pack," she became a multi-million selling disco queen. And she modeled, was a television host, a theatrical actress, a gay activist and the muse and closest friend of Salvador Dali for the last 15 years of his life.

She's also a mystery, even hiding the date of her birth from her husband (anywhere from 1939 to 1950) as well as where she was born, the gender she was assigned at birth, names and nationalities of her parents, and the location of her upbringing.

From the day her career as a singer and model began, rumors of her gender have been around, including the theory that Dali ponsored her sex reassignment surgery and invented her stage name which was untended to be a pun in Catalan: L'Amant de Dalí or Dalí's lover.

She has always denied that she was born a man, despite songs that flirt with the idea like "Fabulous (Lover, Love Me)" and "I'm a Mistery." All this despite numerous articles and images of her original passport using the name Alain Maurice Louis René Tap, which also states that she was born on June 18, 1939 in Saigon.

Who cares. Lear is fabulous.

Lear appears in this film - she thought that it was for a musical comedy and had no idea it was a sex film, which led to a lawsuit - to take us to popular night clubs and sex venues from all around the world. She introduces each city with a song and then D'Amato takes us to the sex scenes, including straight and gay sex, sexual magic tricks, erotic dancing, BDSM, group sex and hey, it's Joe D'Amato, so the moment you get the least bit aroused, he unleashes necrophilia on you.

Also known as Follie di notte (Madness of the Night),Notti pazze della Amanda Lear (Crazy Nights of Amanda Lear),Crazy Nights, Follow Me, Mondo Erotico and the title we listed it as, which means Porn Nights in the World Volume 2, this movie features two of Lear's songs, "Follow Me" and "Enigma (Give a Bit of Mmh to Me)."

If this side of the mondo world interests you, check out the Bruno Mattei-directed Le Notti porno nel mondo and Emanuelle e le porno notti nel mondo n. 2, which has the dream team of Mattei and D'Amato making a mondo erotic film with Laura Gemser hosting. It's not as out of control or shocking as this film, but if you've made it through other D'Amato stuff like Emanuelle in America, you can handle this.

If you've been hankering after a faux mondo documentary about 'the wild, wicked, wonderful world at night' packed with full frontal nudity from both sexes and hosted by a transgender Euro-disco queen, then a) there's not really a lot of choice, and b) have you considered professional help? That said, Joe D'amato's Crazy Nights ticks all of these very particular boxes and is so deliriously loopy that it should prove a reasonable amount of fun if sleazy sexploitation is your bag.

The key thing for me to note is that practically every scene presented by Amanda Lear, the film's manly 'female' host*, involves people taking off all of their clothes - but the naughtiness only starts after the French chanteuse has performed her song 'Follow Me', which was apparently a multi-million-selling chart success in Continental Europe (but not here in the UK - we have a bit more taste than that).

First stop in Ms. Lear's global exploration of all things sexy is Las Vegas, where a group of decadents play a risqué game of chance, the winner of which gets to fornicate with Ruth, the sexy slave girl. The lucky guy whose rope is attached to Ruth's slave collar eagerly drops his trousers as the young woman nips behind a screen and presents her rear through a hole. The curious crowd watch on as the man gets busy, but when the screen is removed, he is shocked to find that he has actually been shagging a sheep. The onlookers applaud and laugh, not appreciating how much psychological damage has been done to the poor sap.

The next sordid segment features a secret society of hooded, robed men who escort a young couple to an altar, where they make love. Meanwhile, the master of ceremonies bends over and forms the front of a man train, the hooded figures linking up behind him in an orgy of sodomy; then they all do a switcheroo, the buggered becoming the buggerers. Thankfully, the ceremonial robes ensure that the action is never explicit - just totally bizarre!

Talking of bizarre, the next scene, which takes place in Tokyo, is completely baffling: a man and a woman, bound hand and foot, use their mouths to remove the strips of newspaper that cover each other's body. When all the paper has gone, they start to lick each other and jump up and down. I'm not sure what D'amato was going for here.

It's off to Brazil next, where a woman performs a dance. And gets naked. Then it's over to Paris, where a man and a woman do a dance. And get naked.

Also in France, a magician invites a man onto stage to assist him with his act. The volunteer and the magician's female assistant get naked (of course) and take part in a trick that sees them swopping lower halves, the man looking down to see a big ol' minge where his tallywhacker once was.

A Berlin hotel provides a meeting place for men with unique vices: a woman stops masturbating to torture a bound man, after which she squeezes lemon juice into his wounds and treats him to a blowjob (D'amato briefly taking his film into XXX territory). Other members of this club include an old man who has his genitals pierced by a big spike (non-graphic),and a couple who like to 'play-act' necrophilia.

In Denmark, a female documentary film-maker interviews husband and wife porn stars, who happily show the woman one of their movies in which the wife sucks and jerks her hubby to completion. The pop shot officially makes Crazy Nights a hardcore film. D'amato so loves his hardcore.

Next up: a couple more magic acts and some more dancing (all with nudity-natch): a witch performs amazing feats of levitation, lifting a statue from a plinth, and causing a bald man's wig to float from his head, before inviting a man on stage, telling him to drop his trousers, and magically giving him a boner; an African couple gyrate to jungle rhythms; a magician pulls objects from his naked assistant's vagina; and a couple of Stockholm ballerinas perform a not-very-classical routine that ends with some lesbian frottering (if they're real ballerinas, I'm Mikhail Baryshnikov).

After all of this globe-trotting, there's just enough time left for Amanda Lear to belt out 'Enigma (Give a Bit of Mmh to Me)', another of her Euro-chart-toppers (I must stress once more... not in the UK).

*Rumour has it that Lear believed D'amato was making a musical, and was mortified to learn that she had been tricked into presenting a smutty mondo movie.

Some movies released on disc take time and effort to dissect what the movie is about, to refine the things you need to say about the movie that allows the reader to see that perhaps a movie that got bad reviews wasn't all that bad or that a movie the critics loved actually was terrible. And then there are movies that are just out and out a waste of time. Like CRAZY NIGHTS.

Released by Full Moon Features, who honestly has some really good movies to share, this one feels like it was picked up for a dime and just as much effort was put into its release. The film tries to be one of those Mondo films of the past, films that captured shocking moments behind the scenes around the world of things best not spoken of in mixed company. And yet every sequence here takes place in mixed company.

Disco songstress Amanda Lear is our so called hostess taking us on a journey to hidden locations where we witness various strip clubs and cabarets where there is plenty of sex taking place. Due to a "money shot" towards the end of the film there is little doubt it would have received an X rating when released unless it was released without a rating. All the sequences in the film seem as natural and realistic as a porn film made at the time so any sense of being an actual Mondo film is lost immediately.

Fans of Lear will be pleased that the movie includes her performing her dance floor tune "Follow Me". If you've never heard of it join the crowd and I was alive during that decade. I'm guessing her entire fan club could fit on that same disco floor she performs on.

The film was directed by Joe D'Amato, a prolific director with over 19y directorial credits to his name. The Italian director worked in many genres but by far the majority of his films fell under the category of porn or light porn. These included the 5 films in the "black Emmanuelle" series. Along the way he made several notable entries in the horror genre but these movies were his bread and butter.

You can put glitz and glitter on a low budget porn film but beneath that it remains a low budget porn film. That's this movie. If you want to see and extreme look at what the disco age was all about, at least from the point of view of the elite few, then give this one a watch. Otherwise you're wasting your time.