Creature with the Blue Hand/Web of the Spider

Creature with the Blue Hand/Web of the Spider
Blu-ray
Film Masters
1967, 1971 / 87, 110 min
Starring Klaus Kinski, Anthony Franciosa, Michelle Mercier
Written by Herbert Reinecker, Bruno Corbucci, Giovanni Grimaldi
Photographed by Sandro Mancori, Memmo Mancori
Directed by Alfred Vohrer, Antonio Margheriti

More ticking time-bomb than actor, Klaus Kinski was born to prowl alleyways located a murder or two away from Berlin’s seediest strip joints—in other words, he was the personification of the sex and violence-soaked Krimi film. He appeared in, give or take, fifteen of those morbidly theatrical shockers and his unpredictable but assuredly violent nature was the perfect ingredient—a “cookie full of arsenic.” The majority of these movies are a thrill-seeker’s idea of heaven but even in dubbed versions their appearance in the states was limited to theaters looking for cheap product to pad a weekend matinee.

To their everlasting credit home video companies have salvaged many of the more esoteric films of the 60s and 70s yet Krimis have yet to find their savior. A beautiful series of Blu ray sets was released by a German company called Tobis but no stateside company has rallied around the cause. Finally Film Masters has stepped up to the plate with their own Kinski double-feature; Creature With The Blue Hand, a late-entry Krimi from 1967, and 1971’s Web Of The Spider, a remake of 1964’s Danza Macabra. Film Masters has done a fine job but it’s a shame the films pale in comparison to their predecessors.

Die blaue Hand, aka, Creature with the Blue Hand, was directed by Alfred Vohrer, one of the most distinctive filmmakers in the Krimi series (he was good at westerns too)—he had Hitchcock’s cheeky sense of the macabre and a bizarre visual humor reminiscent of a Teutonic Tex Avery. Based on Edgar Wallace’s 1925 novel, The Blue Hand, it stars Harald Leipnitz, Ilse Steppat, and Kinski as Dave Emerson, a man institutionalized for a murder he didn’t commit—he says. Emerson quickly escapes the sanitarium for another kind of asylum, his family’s countryside estate where he passes himself off as his twin brother, the similarly wild-eyed Richard. Emerson’s homecoming sparks the appearance of a hooded figure prowling the (many) hidden passageways of this mansion, and anyone coming between that beastly figure and some hidden treasure is dispatched with a formidable steel claw; the “blue hand.”

In most of Vohrer’s films the director was ready to mock any preposterously convoluted plot that crossed his path while dressing up the grisly moments with a sick joke or two, but in Blue Hand he appears to be sleepwalking. Ernst W. Kalinke’s color cinematography is garish in all the wrong ways, not to mention the addition of technicolor which violates the unwritten rule; Krimis are at their most effective in black and white.

Antonio Margheriti’s Danza Macabra remains one of the gems of Italo-gothic horror, released in 1964, it reimagines the Flying Dutchman legend as an old dark house horror show; Barbara Steele and a spectral supporting cast play ghostly time-travelers, doomed to relive their own murders in front of unlucky visitors (like Steele, they never get out alive).

Cinematographer Riccardo Pallottini draped Steele and her co-stars (including her Black Sunday co-star Arturo Dominici) in luscious black and white—but apparently not luscious enough for general audiences, like its heroine, the film suffered several deaths at the box office. Oddly, Margheriti pointed to the film’s monochromatic photography for its failure and in 1971 he remade the film in color as Nella stretta morsa del ragno, Aka The Web of the Spider.

The film follows Margheriti’s original blueprint note for note—a drunken Edgar Allan Poe makes a bet with a reporter named Alan Foster that he won’t survive a night at Blackwood castle, a particularly haunted joint during All Soul’s Eve. Georges Rivière played Foster in Danza Macabra, here he’s embodied by the very American Tony Franciosa. Michelle Mercier inherits Steele’s role as the beautiful ghost caught in a supernatural mousetrap. Klaus Kinski takes the part of Poe, a decision comparable to casting The Rock as William Faulkner.

The director wasn’t happy with the results. Margheriti said it was “stupid to remake it” and came clean on his fatal error: “the color cinematography destroyed everything: the atmosphere, the tension.” He was too hard on the film; the cinematography, by brothers Sandro Mancori and Memmo Mancori, is subdued and painterly and the fine transfer of their work is one of the real virtues of Film Masters’ new Blu ray release.

A two-disc set, it comes with some well-produced—not to mention obscure—extras including: a full length commentary track for both Creature with the Blue Hand and Web of the Spider plus an “enhanced” version of Blue Hand from Al Adamson and Sam Sherman’s Independent International Pictures—in 1987 Sherman filmed a few scenes of extra violence and released it on video as The Bloody Dead (dignity, always dignity). Film Masters is the little engine that could, and hopefully more such esoteric films are on the horizon, meanwhile you can find a little treasure trove of arcane releases at their website.