Follie di Notte (1978)
AKA Crazy Nights
[Uncut Version]
Country: Italy
Language: English dubbed
Subtitles: None
Length: 01:39:20
Resolution: 1920x1036
Size: MKV 3,71Gb
Genre: Erotic, Mondo, Documentary, Musical
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).
By BA_Harrison
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