J Paul Johnson
Film Masters, the preservation and restoration company founded in 2023, continues their remastering and repackaging of tales from cinema’s crypts this month, just in time for Halloween, with a double feature of two German krimi films, both starring the infamous Klaus Kinski, and both of them looking spectacular. The two films—1967’s Creature With the Blue Hand and 1971’s Web of the Spider—benefit from a 4K scan from original 35mm archival elements, packaged with a bouquet of special features on Blu-ray and DVD.
Krimi films like these were extraordinarily popular in their heyday and still offer a richly macabre set of delights. A subgenre of crime films blended with gothic horror, supernatural mystery, sex, and gore, krimi films were to German cinema what giallos were to Italian. Most of these were produced between 1959 and 1972 by the West German company Rialto Film and many, like these, adapted the works of British writer Edgar Wallace for their material, doing so loosely as to push the envelope of what could be shown onscreen. Abbreviated from for the German term Kriminalfilm or Kriminalroman, the krimi film offered its audiences a rich feast of salacious thrills.
Creature With the Blue Hand
Creature With the Blue Hand puts its star Klaus Kinski front and center throughout in a dual role as the mercurial star plays identical twins David and Richard. The former has just escaped from a sanitarium of dubitable repute, and a series of mysterious murders occur in short order. These are the work of the “Creature with the Blue Hand,” a legend of the family lore and manifest in the present as cloaked figure with an armored-claw hand. But is it indeed David committing the murders? Or is it the “good twin” who enjoys the riches of his family’s estate? Or does the true secret of the Blue Hand lie elsewhere among the sanitarium’s filthy cells or the estate’s secret corridors?
Originally released in Germany as Die Blaue Hand, the film was bought by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures and released in the U.S. in 1967 as the alternate version, Creature With the Blue Hand. Film Masters presents this version for the first time on Blu-ray in North America. Directed by Alfred Vohrer, the film also stars Harald Leipnitz and Carl Lange. It was later released to home video in the U.S. as The Bloody Dead in 1987 with six minutes of new footage, shot specifically for the release, which is included alongside Creature With the Blue Hand as a bonus feature.
Creature With the Blue Hand is as good as krimi gets and makes for an excellent introduction to the subgenre, replete as it is with almost everything one might want—a compelling mystery, a gory body count, a morbidly rich family with secrets galore, a grubby sanitarium, a mad doctor, hidden passages, and, whatever one makes of the notorious Kinski, an excellent lead performance as the good and bad twins. (Fortunately, only once does the film try to include them in the same scene in an ungainly double exposure.) Creature With the Blue Hand and The Bloody Dead are presented with an aspect ratio of 1.66:1; restored in 4K, the film’s detail is fine and the colors rich: it looks, simply, spectacular.
Web of the Spider
If Kinski is at the center in his dual role in Creature with the Blue Hand, he’s relegated to the periphery in 1971’s Web of the Spider. The fun part is that he plays, literally, master of suspense Edgar Allan Poe; the disappointment is that aside from the film’s framing device, Kinski’s Poe is absent from the narrative, the protagonist instead an American writer, Alan Foster (Anthony Franciosa), who, on a bet from Poe and his friend Lord Blackwood (Enrico Osterman), is dared to spend an entire night in a creepy deserted castle.
As one might imagine, the castle is not deserted at all, which would make for a terrible narrative; rather, it’s populated by a lively coterie of residents and party guests, among them the beautiful Elisabeth Blackwood (Michèle Mercier), for whom Foster falls. There are, of course, complications, including one small detail that Elizabeth reveals: she is not exactly alive. That’s just one of the problems Foster encounters as dead bodies pile up on her bed and elsewhere in the castle: he also learns he is not the only one enamored of Elizabeth’s affections and that the castle has a sinister and supernatural history.
Web of the Spider, like Creature with the Black Hand, has the requisite creepy setting and cast of fascinating characters (many of them played in both films by members of Rialto’s stock troupe). It even trumps Creature when it comes to sex (including not one but two salacious lesbian scenes) and gore, including a poor snake apparently not protected by the German equivalent of the ASPCA. It too, like the main feature, looks absolutely spectacular. What it lacks is a charismatic protagonist with any degree of agency: Franciosa’s Foster basically watches the castle’s wild shenanigans unfold in front of him but rarely takes any action or engages in any emotion other than lust or bewilderment.
Even so, Web of the Spider, a remake of director Antionio Margheriti’s 1964’s black-and-white Castle of Blood, is a worthy companion feature and follow-up to Creature With the Black Hand. Film Masters presents the 92-minute U.S. release. Web of the Spider is presented with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. Both discs are region locked to North America and include English SDH with DTS-HD/Dolby AC3s audio.
Special Features
As per usual, if not more so, Film Masters presents a wealth of special features to contextualize the primary films.
New 4K transfer of The Bloody Dead. The alternate version of Creature with the Blue Hand is at best a mild curiosity to examine for comparison’s sake, though nonetheless a welcome addition to the special edition package.
A Man of Mystery: Inside the World of Edgar Wallace. This new 13-minute mini-documentary from Ballyhoo Productions, hosted by screenwriter and author Pete Atkins, examines Wallace’s life, times, and cinematic afterlife. Best known still for having written the original King Kong (1932), Wallace has been adapted to film dozens of times, both in his native England and in Germany for Rialto.
Kinski Krimis: Inside the Rialto Film Adaptations. This 17-minute featurette, also produced by Ballyhoo, is hosted by C. Courtney Joyner, and focuses on the notorious actor’s time spent with the Rialto company’s stock company as they adapted Wallace’s productions to the krimi subgenre. Kinski was, of course, infamously difficult and troubled, especially as posthumous revelations of his abuse of one of his daughters has come to light; this featurette focuses more on his developing career in the 1960s than on his psychological problems and abusive behaviors.
Commentary tracks are provided both Creature With the Blue Hand and Web of the Spider by authors and film historians Stephen Jones and Kim Newman. Theirs is a fast-paced, interactive, and largely, it seems, improvised conversation running a gamut of topics relevant to the two films, Rialto Productions, Edgar Wallace, Klaus Kinski, the krimi and giallo subgenres, and more. Samuel M. Sherman provides an archival commentary track for The Bloody Dead.
Trailers include both an original 35mm film trailer and a recut trailer using restored film elements for Creature with the Blue Hand; a new 2024 trailer for Web of the Spider; and the original English theatrical trailer for Castle of Blood.
Liner notes for the two films are provided for Creature With the Blue Hand by Nick Clark and Web of the Spider by Christopher Stewardson in a 24-page color booklet with stills from the two releases.
Altogether, the double feature of Kinski-krimi makes for an excellent introduction to the subgenre and, especially in the case of the delightful Creature With the Blue Hand, excellent Halloween viewing, with plenty of supplemental features to sate one’s appetite for more.
