Amsterdamned

My regular reader will know well that I’m constantly jaw-dropped by the more obscure choices that streaming networks make; Netflix are currently offering Dick Emery and Delroy Lindo in 1976’s Find the Lady, while Amazon Prime went for Mae West in Sextette. But credit should be given for Prime in the UK exhuming Amsterdamned, a 1988 thriller last seen on grainy VHS through the auspices of Vestron video. Widely forgotten, it appears in a sparklingly sharp print that reveals the amusing 80’s-ness of the film in granular detail.

Writer and director Dick Maas’s film is an ungainly hybrid; billed as a slasher movie, there’s not much slashing to behold. It’s not quite a monster-movie either, although a passing bag-lady describes the antagonist in these terms. It’s essentially a serial killer movie, but with all kinds of wacky trimmings. Hard-ass detective Eric Visser (Huub Stapel) is put in charge of tracking down a killer who emerges from the canals of Amsterdam to assault the unwary. Visser is paired with an expert diver (Wim Zomer) who is hopefully described here as Holland’s Sean Penn. With only fish for witnesses, as one cop oddly explains, the two men must identify the killer before he strikes again…

Amsterdamned isn’t the best film ever made, obviously, but it is racy, knuckleheaded stuff. The shooting on location is wildly outdoorsy, and Amsterdamned always looks slick AF, particularly in an elaborate speedboat chase that outclasses any Bond set piece from the 80’s; they even throw in a police car smashing through a mobile church organ just for gratuitous kicks. And the dubbing is memorable in terms of the nuances of English as she is spoke; two policeman flirt with a lady with the quotable line ‘Eyes on the sparrow, right?’ Fluent speakers will know that the correct response is for the lady to shout ‘Halleluiah!’ over her shoulder. And yet, when the journey finally ends, the pursuit leads to what does appear to be a proper monster after all; no human being can pull a trawler under the waterline with their bare hands, surely, and the final explanation is more sci-fi than horror, complete with an impressive make-up job.

Sometimes you just have to let art wash over you, and if you can handle the lurid subject, Amsterdamned is an 80’s movie that plays rather amusingly in 2021. The leather-jacketed hero in his mirrored MacGruber sunglasses, the psychic children who inform his police-work, the primary-coloured wet-suits, every madcap cliché that can be found is thrown into the mix. With over a century of films to choose from, it’s inexplicable why Amazon Prime picked a zesty little shocker like Amsterdamned to exhume, but if you’ve got a taste for cheesy 80’s police work, you’ll be glad they did…