Amsterdamned is weird in a great way. Part police thriller, part slasher flick, it moves like a Michael Mann film with cool confidence and expertly shot action. Too many of these movies include a boring foot chase, often with minimal camera movement. This one has a wonderful chase involving a car, a motorcycle, and a couple of horses on the crowded streets of Amsterdam. Later, the good guy and the bad guy speed through the waterways on motorboats, careening around obstacles and tight corners. It’s what movies were made for.
The villain, a scuba diving serial killer, creeps out of the water at night to murder his victims before returning to the canals undetected. Armed with a diving knife and a speargun, many of his kills take place off screen, but the results are nasty. When one of his victims reels an anchor in, he finds the severed head of his buddy attached to the end. (Now, how the villain was able to yank his buddy into the water, cut his head off, and attach it to said anchor without making a sound is a different matter.) Like Jack the Ripper, this villain displays his victims’ remains in startling ways. I don’t know what the Dutch are drinking, but I greatly admire the way their filmmakers handle fantasy violence.
Enter Detective Eric Visser, reminiscent of William Petersen’s detective in Manhunter. Visser is a single father who’s about as hard boiled as a character believably gets. Upon investigating the local scuba scene, Visser meets the film’s love interest, Laura, a museum guide who has taken up diving on the recommendation of her psychiatrist. The psychiatrist will immediately become the audience’s prime suspect as the film takes its time to give him a mysterious backstory that apparently serves no purpose, at least initially. Meanwhile, with precious few leads, the police begin a patrol of the canals that even they admit is a waste of time.
What’s especially attractive about the movie is that director Dick Maas photographs Amsterdam with the same love and street-level attention as Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee show for New York. The movie is grounded in that sense, which provides a solid base for its more fantastical elements. For example, the killer displays a baffling resiliency for a guy who hasn’t been established as a supernatural entity. He will be shot several times and at one point blown up in a fiery explosion, but he just keeps coming back. So it’s particularly interesting, perhaps very Dutch, how the conflict ultimately resolves at the end.
Amsterdamned isn’t a visually gory film, but conceptually it is a brutal one. It feels like it’s equal parts Tom Savini and Brian De Palma. While I almost always recommend the subtitled version of foreign films, the dubbed version is easy to source and features English dialogue provided by some of the original actors. As far as dubs go, it’s one of the best I’ve ever heard. It’s also one of the most unique slasher films I’ve ever seen. The biggest mystery is how it seems relatively forgotten, though it was a financial success at the time of its release. It deserves a much bigger following than it currently enjoys.
