Amsterdamned !!?

For no particular reason, I was reminded of the movie ‘Amsterdamned’ (1988, IMDB description), a fine Dutch thriller / horror about a scuba diver with a large blade. Or something like that. I can’t really remember the details except for that the title song was sung by a (Dutch) band called Lois Lane (Dutch site here). The titlesong was a hit then too, with the following brilliant lines:

You can’t hide
From the monster reptile, ooohooo, yeah
Amsterdamned, Amsterdamned, oho
This is Amsterdamned

Not brilliant then, but at least it’s catchy, right? And then there is this Washington Post review (1988) that says:

The story is hopelessly stale; even the hairstyles seem time-warped. Supposedly, the film was something of a sensation in Holland, which perhaps says more about the cultural life of the Netherlands than about the movie. The notoriety, I would imagine, is due to some of the director’s more garish touches, like the murder of an attractive, scantily swimsuited young woman in a tiny inflatable boat.

Hey, bud, we’re talking about Amsterdam here: it’s all about boats and scantily dressed people. And scuba divers. Lots of them.

Not completely related: I saw David Lynch got a honourary lifetime achievement award at the Venice film festival. The festival also showed Lynch’s latest movie, which ‘includes hallucinatory scenes and a rabbit voiced by Naomi Watts’. Lynch apparently baffled critics by saying that the movie (Inland Empire) ‘made perfectly sense’. I think, I’d like to see this movie.

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