Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

Teringer An Exercise In Nonsense

Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

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

Nick Duguay Amsterdamned is a wonderful late eighties artistic slasher film that suffers from a rather unfortunate title. Although it was made in the Netherlands, it has all the trappings and style of a giallo piece. Honestly if it weren't for the location and language I could have easily taken it for giallo. Speaking of the location, excellent use is made of the canals, especially during one hectic chase scene- which although long, is never boring, and kept me absolutely riveted. The canals and the city of Amsterdam also create a very palpable atmosphere which really brings the entire film up a notch. In fact, it reminds me a lot of the film Don't Look Now. In addition are the meticulously decorated sets common to euro-horror and giallo. Amsterdamned is a fun, tight, and thrilling horror film that can be enjoyed by fans of both giallo and American slashers alike.

jos_santen In my opinion, there aren't that many Dutch thrillers that couldn't be characterized as "only be suitable for typical Dutch soil". Indeed, the storyline of Amsterdam is perfectly aptly for the Amsterdam canal network, of both its singular beauty and mystery. Indeed, there's a contradiction between the attraction that these canals have on both numerous tourists and all the Amsterdam inhabitants. The canals are only worshiped by being navigated and watched from the wharfs and buildings. As far as I know, Amsterdamned is the very first movie that unravels a fear that's felt by many Dutch water freaks who dive, swim or sail in any Dutch lake, shore, swimming pool or ditch. They have fantasized about exploring the Amsterdam canals, but feel too much fear of realizing it because of being scared off by the menacing nontransparent waterlines. The murderer of Amsterdamned must have occurred in anyone's nightmare before this movie was released. Therefore, Amsterdamned is a kind of epoch-making story. Water crime is hardly ever published in media. Amsterdamned is a perfect paramount of the thin line between imaginable crimes from the canals that once could happen in reality and anyone's unspoken recurring fear of hidden malevolent divers. Although the main characters of Amsterdamned are just flat and a little shallow, the tension is built up very well. Indeed, it takes a lot of time before the real perpetrator is both found and arrested. His mutilated voice is only unveiled in the very end of the movie. So before this revealing scene, the main question is: what's the face behind the masquerade in the shape of a diving suit? Furthermore, the diver's motives for his atrocious deeds in the canals, is only told very lately by a psychotherapist, who previously didn't appear to be an ambiguous person at all. Therefore, Amsterdamned has enough surprising personal plots.

chaos-rampant 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.

Maedhros35 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.