Review #1,170: 'Amsterdamned' (1988)

In Amsterdam's Red Light District, a young prostitute catches a taxi home and is almost raped by the driver, but she manages to fight him off and flee before any harm comes to her. Sadly for her, there's also a murderous lunatic on the loose, who stabs the poor lady to death and drags her bloody corpse into the nearby canal. Her body is discovered in gruesome fashion as her lifeless body is displayed on a bridge, only be smeared across the top of a boat filled with screaming tourists. As the body count rises, gruff detective Eric Visser (Huub Stapel) is assigned to the case, but this killer proves particularly difficult to catch. As well as possessing a high level of intelligence, the masked psychopath also uses the many canals running throughout the city for shelter. With pressure building from his bosses, he must work fast before the killer strikes again.

Almost like a warped advert for tourists, Amsterdamned portrays the great city in all its beauty. We see everything the city has to offer; the canals, the Rembrandt paintings, the breweries, and of course, the Red Light District. If it didn't include the many brutal murders, this could have been made by the tourist board. The city provides the backdrop for a string of stylishly-executed slayings, including a beheading by moonlight and a knife through a dinghy you won't soon forget. It also finds the time (and the budget) for a terrific, outlandish speed boat chase between the killer and Visser (put together by the brilliantly-named Dickey Beer), which pulls out all the stops and puts many films with much bigger budgets completely to shame. Infused with a giallo-esque sensibility, director Dick Maas makes an entire city feel somehow claustrophobic.

At almost two hours, Amsterdamned also long outstays its welcome, padding the film out with unnecessary sub-plots that seem to either disappear (Visser's relationship with his teenage daughter is given a lot of focus of early on, but then the film seems to forget about her completely) or fizzle out into nothing. While these moments are often filled with amusing dialogue (the strange sense of humour will likely have you laughing at loud on occasion), they also deliver long stretches of boredom. However, with its silly title and by-the-numbers premise, Amsterdamned is far better than it has any right to be, and will certainly surprise anyone going in expecting a routine slasher picture. Trimmed of some fat, this could have been something to write home about, but this is still an entertaining and creative little Euro-horror.


Directed by: Dick Maas
Starring: Huub Stapel, Monique van de Ven, Serge-Henri Valcke, Hidde Maas
Country: Netherlands

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie