Ab Abspoel Movies
- 1986
The Dutch-filmed Assault was based on a novel by Harry Mulisch. Presented in a non-linear, flashback/flashword fashion, the film tells the story of a physician whose family was killed by the Nazis during World War II. This came about after the family's neighbors dragged the body of a dead collaborator to their doorstep. The doctor spends his entire adult life trying to find out why his neighbors had betrayed his family. At various isolated moments of political upheaval in Europe, the doctor comes closer and closer to the truth. During a 1984 anti-missile rally, the mystery is solved--and the answer is more complex than anyone back in 1945 had imagined. The hero's "growth" is thus placed in the context of the international turmoil of the four decades following the war. Marc van Uchelen plays the main character as a 12-year-old, while Derek de Lint portrays the adult physician. In a nicely underplayed symbolic touch, Monique van de Ven is cast in a dual role, playing de Lint's wife in the "present" scenes, and an older woman who is murdered by the Nazis because she shelters young van Uchelen in the flashback sequences. The Assault was the "best foreign film" Academy Award winner of 1987. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
- Starring:
- Derek de Lint, Monique Van de Ven, (more)
- 1983
Black humor dominates in this macabre story about a murderously animated elevator and its repairman Felix (Huub Stapel) and Felix's voluntary new assistant Mieke (Willeke van Ammelrooy), a reporter for a tabloid paper. When the elevator decapitates a security guard and tries to suffocate some party-goers, it becomes obvious that it needs more than a 60,000-mile check-up. After Felix narrows down the possibilities to some experiments his company is doing with microchips, he is coincidentally suspended from his job -- indicating that the elevator is not acting alone. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi
- Starring:
- Huub Stapel, Willeke van Ammelrooy, (more)
- 1981
- PG
Made for theatrical release by a Dutch TV production firm, this stars Renee Soutendijk in the title role. The Girl is a Dutch wartime resistance leader, who is killed before the film proper gets under way. Through the reminiscences of her best friend, we are given every detail of the Girl's life, loves and dreams (she was a sheltered college student at the outbreak of the War). We also learn what inspired the Girl to become a sang froid assassin of Nazi informers. Director Ben Verbong collaborated on the screenplay with Peter de Vos, author of the factual book (Theun de Vries) upon which the film was based. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
- Starring:
- Renée Soutendijk, Peter Tuinman, (more)
- 1980
This drama by three young directors (Rene Seegers, Jean van de Velde, and Leon de Winter) is enhanced by its unique perspective: it contrasts the unappealing, industrialized, noisy, poor, and polluted world of today with an ideal view of the past. Herman Durer (Felix-Jan Kuipers) is a social dropout who has spent a bit of time behind bars and finds the concept of a job repugnant. Then one day he reads a book (itself unusual) about a leisurely, 18th-century life in Italy, just the kind of life he wants to lead. Armed with gritty determination and no sense, Herman leaves Amsterdam for the greener pastures of Italy. His imagination conjures up an 18th-century view of the world around him that stands in stark contrast to the reality he sees on his way to an unobtainable Shangri-la. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi
- Starring:
- Ab Abspoel
Spetters further elaborates on the themes of sexual obsession previously probed in director Paul Verhoeven's Turkish Delight (1973). Hans Van Tongeren, Toon Agterberg and Maarten Spanjer play, respectively, Reen, Eve and Hans, a closely-knit group of teenage motorcycle lovers who idolize local cycling champion Witkamp (played by Rutger Hauer, the star of Delight). Unfortunately, the adolescents' attempts to rebel take a dark and brutal turn when Van Tongeren is permanently injured in a road accident and Agterberg is gang raped by a group of homosexuals. While the other two young men lust after Fientje (Renee Soutendjik), a promiscuous hashhouse waitress, Agterberg responds to the rape by coming out and taking Fientje's gay brother as a lover. Verhoeven is artistically and sexually graphic in juxtaposing "cycle love" with the friends' carnal interrelations. The title of Spetters is an indigenous triple-entendre -- it refers to the Dutch vernacular for "grease spatterings" (both the oily renderings left behind by the motorcycles commandeered by the film's central characters and the grease slung by Soutendjik), is a slang term for male ejaculate, and was frequently used in the seventies and eighties to refer to people who are sexually appealing ("That girl is a spetter.")
~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
- Starring:
- Hans Van Tongeren, Renée Soutendijk, (more)
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