Written and directed by Dick Maas in 1988, Amsterdamned follows a Dutch cop named detective Eric Visser (Huub Stapel). He works his life away in Amsterdam where his tough guy persona seems to be a draw for the city's female population. Visser is no angel, he's recently divorced and struggling with being a single dad to his daughter Anneke (Tatum Dagelet), but he is a good cop. When a serial killer starts preying upon the population of his home town, the top brass decide that he's the man for the job, and soon enough he's trying to put together the pieces of the puzzle and figure out who the killer is. The murderer's motif is an interesting one: he prowls the canals of Amsterdam in a scuba outfit, surprising his victims from below the surface of the many canals and waterways that populate the city!

That happens fairly quickly in the film, but as Visser draws ever closer to his target, the bodies begin to pile up. City officials are ramping up pressure to put a stop to this before it has an even bigger negative effect on summer tourism dollars, leaving Visser between a rock and a hard place. Along the way he meets, and falls for, Laura (Monique van de Ven), a gorgeous museum worker. And we all know what happens to pretty girls who get romantically involved with cops chasing serial killers, right?

Much more of a cop thriller with some giallo-esque trappings than the horror picture that it is often marketed as, Amsterdamned is nevertheless a rousing slice of exploitation tinged entertainment. Dick Maas keeps things moving at a breakneck speed but not at the cost of character development or storytelling. The murder scenes are fairly vicious and frequently creative, and the killer that serves as the picture's chief antagonist is memorable not just for his penchant for dive gear, but for his methods and eerie personality as well.

As to the performances, Huub Stapel is a really solid lead. His character is reminiscent of Alain Delon or maybe Jean Paul Belmondo with a touch of Clint Eastwood and a dash of Tomas Milian thrown in to keep things interesting. His character is the typically world weary, grizzled cop you'd expect to lead in a picture like this, he's not the most original onscreen creation you'll ever see, but Stapel plays the part very well and makes for a fine leading man. He also has some great chemistry with the gorgeous Monique van de Ven (who Paul Verhoeven fans will remember appearing alongside Rutger Hauer in Turkish Delight, her 1973 feature film debut). Tatum Dagelet is also quite good here as Visser's mischievous daughter.

Another big part of what makes the movie as well as it does is the location shooting and the stunt work. Placing the film in the middle of the infamous Dutch city gives it a lot of character based purely on the visuals alone and in a way the movie serves as a travelogue of sorts, showing off various landmarks, museums and locals. The film's rather famous speedboat chase sequence, a hallmark of practical stunt work and reason enough on its own to seek the film out, does use some Utrecht locations, but otherwise this was all shot where it pretends to take place.

Add to all of this some impressive cinematography from Marc Felperlaan (who also worked with Maas on The Lift and The Shaft) and a very cool score composed by Maas himself and Amsterdamned shapes up to be well worth checking out for fans of action movies and thrillers alike.

Video:

Amsterdamned arrives on Blu-ray from Blue Underground on a 50GB disc framed at 1.85.1 widescreen and presented in AVC encoded 1080p high definition. Taken from a new 2k master approved by Dick Maas himself, the image quality is excellent. The original pressing of this release suffered from some obvious compression issues and macroblocking that clearly hurt things, particularly in the darker sequences. Blue Underground has since reissued a corrected disc that fixes this issue. The compression problems are gone and the new transfer is excellent. The image is clean, almost pristine, but it is free of obvious noise reduction and presents fine grain without problems. The black levels are good, skin tones look fine and color reproduction is nice. Fine detail is typically very strong and frequently very impressive, as is depth and texture.