Such a frustrating disappointment

i must have seen a different film!!

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

I can't help myself: I greatly respect Dick Maas. He directed three self-penned movies to Dutch box office success in the 80s, all three fast-paced, original stories permeated with a typical Dutch brand of humor. You could make a case that Maas is the Low Countries' equivalent to Luc Besson or Quentin Tarantino, even if his work doesn't come close to a quarter of their production values - or their international recognition.With its faux-English title, touristy Amsterdam settings and serial killer/hardboiled cop storyline, "Amsterdamned" (1988) was made with an eye on international success. As always, Maas' direction is instinctively entertaining, doesn't waste time and doesn't mind sacrificing logic for pace and shock value. It results in trashy 80s fare. Personally? I love it. Don't expect "Seven" or "The Silence of the Lambs", but enjoy the lewd sex scenes, speedboat chases and blood stains. Time will fly; Maas and lead Huub Stapel know what they're doing.But does "Amsterdamned" work for an international audience? Only if you're prepared to appreciate the irreverent, self-deprecating sense of humor as part of the movie's charm. Maas' shtick as a writer/director is so fundamentally Dutch that his international ambitions were probably doomed from the start. But let's give the man his due: he wrote his own stuff, put his own money on the line and drew big crowds to the theaters, creating popular culture at a time when other Dutch directors were busy adapting 19th-century novels.

Initially I thought I would like this. In the credit sequence that opens this, a curious camera emerges from underwater to steal illicit glimpses of the neon Amsterdam night. The colors are bright and soft, and they bleed into a night of unspoken promise. Combined with this, the grisly murder (of a prostitute in skintight leotard, this fundamentally 80's of slasher movie beings) that follows made me anticipate an Argento or DePalma.Alas, it is not. We don't get the adventurous camera that embarks upon discoveries of psychosexual violence, or even a second rate giallo, instead we get a hackneyed police proceedural.We get a car chase and a boat chase through the canals, in the hope that they will inject excitement. Instead, they bore me with their 'action flick' tedium. We also see a boat singlehandedly towed away by one man in scuba gear, then sunk (with a knife?).The resolution of this stuns with its badness, with its cheesy, cheap ideas of twists and revenge. Cop things on 80's TV were more intelligent than this.

A mysterious diver hiding in Amsterdam's canal system embarks on a rampage of gruesome murders. Terrifying city officials and leaving few clues for the city's best detective, who doesn't suspect that both his new girlfriend and twelve-year-old daughter may be closer than he is to finding the killer..An absolute hoot from beginning to end, the fact that this film is so full of humour, despite the bad script, makes this a curious watch.It's a typical eighties film, we start with the hero, sporting a hangover and a mullet whilst in the bath, getting alerted to the first murder, only to apprehend a robber in the bakery and then giving a payoff one-liner.He finds the first body, gives a one-liner and starts his investigation proper. We are given a few red herrings along the way as to who the murderer is, but the story and the narrative, make it a little hard to understand what is going on.It's part slasher, part horror, part crime, part comedy, and it all works in a random way.The cast are good, but a lot of the support tend to overact, and the main speed boat chase isn't just the longest one in history, it's the single funniest action set piece i have ever seen.Throw in a random sex scene, with some extremely questionable noise coming from the fairer of the two, Riffs on Jaws and Friday the 13th, then you have one weird entertaining film.It's the best Dutch film about a disfigured deep sea diving killer in the world ever.

This movie combines most of the not-so-good parts of Dutch movies in general: poor camera, awful sound, and *poor* dialogues.In addition to those, this film also has a storyline which is easily forgotten and a strange, out-of-the-blue-ending. Note: most of the shots in the canals ("grachten") was done in Utrecht, not Amsterdam.