|
|
|
Creature with the Blue Hand/Web of the Spider
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Film Masters Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (27th October 2024). |
|
The Film
 "For those craving a taste of "Euro-Kinski," two of Klaus Kinski's European features are now available in one creepy package. Presented for the first time on Blu-ray, Creature with the Blue Hand (1967) is a mystery-thriller about a series of grisly murders. It's one of several German films based on the novels of Edgar Wallace, many adaptations of which starred Kinski. This time he plays an escaped mental patient who might be the killer. Meanwhile, Web of the Spider (1971) is a classic haunted house tale from Italian maestro, Antonio Margheriti, with Kinski as none other than Edgar Allan Poe! It's a diabolical double dose from one of cinema's most controversial and unique figures!" Creature with the Blue Hand: Sentenced to spend the rest of his life in an insane asylum for murder by the intervention of esteemed psychiatrist/asylum owner Dr. Mangrove (The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism's Carl Lange), David Emerson (Aguirre, the Wrath of God's Klaus Kinski) protests his innocence before the court, the press, and his family: imperious mother Lady Emerson (On Her Majesty's Secret Service's Ilse Steppat), twin brother Richard, smitten half-sister Myrna (Barry Lyndon's Diana Kφrner), and younger half-brothers Robert (Le Mans' Peter Parten) and Charles (Red Rings of Fear's Thomas Danneberg). Two years later, he manages to escape Mangrove's sanatorium, ostensibly leaving a trail of two dead bodies a nurse and his favorite guard leading directly to family seat Graystone Hall where the convenient absence of Richard allows him to assume his brother's identity just as Mangrove and Inspector Craig (Marquis de Sade's Justine's Harald Leipnitz) arrive in pursuit. Snooping around, Craig determines that the weapon is "The Blue Hand" a piece of armor with razor fingers worn by one of the family's medieval ancestors. Craig does not fall for David's subterfuge for a minute but an attack on Myrna by a hooded figure with the weapon seems to rule David out, especially when the killer is more successful at dispatching Robert during another attempt on Myrna's life. Craig's boss at Scotland Yard Sir John (The Door with 7 Locks' Siegfried Schόrenberg) allows David to maintain his disguise while they investigate, although that places him in the thick of things as the killer continues to pick off members of the family who all still suspect David while only he and Craig and possibly the skulking butler Anthony (Frozen Alive's Albert Bessler) know that Richard is missing and may already be dead. Meanwhile, Myrna has vanished on the way to the hospital and police protective custody and winds up in Mangrove's asylum. The umpteenth entry in the long-running West German Edgar Wallace krimi series that started in 1959 with the highly-successful The Fellowship of the Frog, The Creature with the Blue Hand is ostensibly based on the novel titled "The Blue Hand" but is actually like much of the series in recycling and shuffling plot elements from earlier films and from a handful of the author's most popular works (both the U.K. and West Germany saw multiple adaptations of Wallace's "The Case of the Frightened Lady" and his play "The Terror" which was later novelized as "The Indian Scarf"). There's the old dark house, the scheme to get control of the family fortune by convincing an heir (or heiress) that they are insane, while the finger knife gauntlet is the only thing that sets the hooded killer apart from the killer monk of The Sinister Monk and College Girl Murders. The sometimes very abrupt removal of ten minutes of footage for the English-language version which at times feels like an 8mm cut-down cannot entirely be blamed for the how messy the story is, with both Kinski in a dual-role and Kφrner doing the screaming yet feeling as much sub-Karin Dor as Bessler is sub-Eddi Arent. The old dark house scenes are atmospheric with some unique set design that gives the film more of an Italian Gothic look of the vaguely-similar but superior The Virgin of Nuremberg while the first appearance of "The Blue Hand" brings to mind the antiques store sequence in Blood and Black Lace, but the asylum intrigue involving mistreated inmates, corrupt orderlies, and tortures by snakes and rats feels more like "greatest hits" filler with much of the solutions and revelations worked out offscreen before being explained in the "gathering all the suspects together" conclusion. If Creature with the Blue Hand remains watchable outside of its context as an entry in the Wallace series, it is due to its Gothic chills than a diverting plot.  Web of the Spider: In London seeking an interview with touring author the macabre Edgar Allan Poe (Kinski), foolhardy American journalist Alan Foster (Tenebrae's Anthony Franciosa) accepts a wager from Poe's aristocratic crony Lord Thomas Blackwood (The Church's Enrico Osterman) to spend the night in his family's haunted ancestral castle to see proof of the corporeal reality of the subjects of which Poe writes. Despite the cobwebs, rotten wood, and crumbling stone, he is pleasantly surprised by the very warm presence of Blackwood's sister Elisabeth (Black Sabbath's Michele Mercier) whose brother prefers to think of her as no longer among the living due to a family scandal. Elisabeth warmly welcomes him, but leaves him to discover the castle's other mysterious inhabitants including jealous and possessive bisexual cousin Julia (Cave of the Living Dead's Karin Field), Elisabeth's husband William (The Horrible Dr. Hichcock's Silvano Tranquilli) who is surprisingly sanguine about her attraction to the young visitor, Elisabeth's hunky stable groom lover Herbert (The Great Silence's Raf Baldassarre), and professor of metaphysics Dr. Carmus (A Study in Terror's Peter Carsten) who promises to show him scientific proof that the senses, particularly intense emotions survive beyond the death of the body. Often derided as director Antonio Margheriti's and producer Giovanni Addessi's widescreen Technicolor remake of their golden age Italian Gothic Castle of Blood, Web of the Spider lacks the sumptuous monochrome presence of Italy's scream queen Barbara Steele but attempts to compensate for it stylistically; indeed, one could almost say that this is almost Castle of Blood were made by Mario Bava, particularly with its emphasis early in the film on the scenario of a man alone in the dark whose imagination seems to go to work on its own in terrifying him. While the earlier film began with a London cityscape for the credits before following Foster from the street into the pub where he comes across Tranquilli as Poe reciting his story "Berenice" for the other customers, this film casts Kinski as the obsessed essence of Poe and visualizes the story under the credits and then cuts to him delivering its climax dramatically. Foster here is introduced as a "face at the window" whose vocal addressing of Poe along with a hand on the shoulder triggers a canted angle, as if he were already one of the ghosts making Poe a witness to the reenactment of the last night of his life (Franciosa is a cheerful contrast to Kinski although one wonders what the Method actor must have thought of throwing himself around during the slow motion climax which now seems to ape Kinski's opening credits performance). When he enters the castle, his watch stops and the grandfather clock starts and stops and starts again like some mechanism whose spring still has some tension in it. When Foster noodles out a tune on the harpsichord it is almost as if he is winding a music box and setting the moving parts into action. This is conveyed through elegant dolly moves and rhythmic zooms that once seemed a confusing jumble in center-cropped TV prints and video masters; indeed, while the Techniscope cinematography of Guglielmo Mancori and Sandro Mancori is nowhere near as gorgeous as that of Carlo Carlini on Margheriti's other Gothic throwback Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye, it is rehabilitated in proper widescreen presentations. Indeed, it is less the sometimes abrupt music editing than the trims imposed on the English version by Fima Noveck a "film doctor" responsible for the "Blood Couple" linear re-edit of Bill Gunn's Ganja & Hess as well as the export versions of Sergio Martino's The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, and Lina Wertmuller's Blood Feud among others that throw off the fluid nature of sequences with blunt edits where the original editing has otherwise demonstrated that it would linger on a movement or use a cutaway. While composer Riz Ortolani had recycled decade-old cues from both Castle of Blood and The Virgin of Nuremberg for the aforementioned Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye, for Web of the Spider he mixed shrieking strings and electric guitar for the horror sequences and a gentle romantic theme more subtly employed in the mix. On the other hand, the film drags during dialogue scenes and Mercier is overshadowed both by Steele in the original film and Field here while Arturo Dominici's rendition of Carmus in the earlier film is more effective than that of Carsten (Osterman makes more of his supporting role than genre favorite Umberto Raho who was just there in the original). Despite the more permissive times, there is little gore and some fleeting nudity but little eroticism which is a major misstep in a film with a lesbian subplot Field is "warmer" than Margaret Robsahm icier version of Julia in keeping with the period in exploitation where lesbians went from cold manhaters to bisexual, and there is a scene exclusive to the German version where she strips down to manipulate Herbert and a scene of a nude woman attacked by a female "vampire". Even before the remake, screenwriters Giovanni Grimaldi and Bruno Corbucci had already recycled the conceit of ghosts needing blood to prolong their existence even if it consists of constantly reliving the events leading up to their deaths in Lady Morgan's Vengeance, one of the more elusive Italian Gothics of the golden age until remastered as part of Arrow Video's Gothic Fantastico: Four Italian Tales of Terror set, which started out as a conventional husband, mistress, and servants gaslighting his wealthy heiress wife only to then turn into a ghost story for spectacular final act. 
Video
Creature with the Blue Hand was picked up by Sam Sherman's Independent-International who sat on it until Roger Corman's New World Pictures needed a support feature for Beast of the Yellow Night (a film shot in the Philippines that Hemisphere Pictures was expecting to handle). After the five year theatrical contract, the film reverted to Sherman who sold it to television. While an unauthorized version appeared on VHS from Platinum Productions not to be confused with Plantinum Picture Corp. rather than dumping it onto Sherman's own Super Video line, he tried to cash in on the slasher genre by shooting new footage including Ed French gore inserts for the video version "The Bloody Dead" the artwork of which refashioned the "blue hand" more along the lines of Freddy Kruger's glove (more on this version below) which was shot around 1987 but did not actually hit VHS until 1997. While the uncut German version turned up in a handsome anamorphic widescreen transfer as one of the Wallace titles without the English dub or subtitles on DVD in Germany separately or as part of the four-disc Edgar Wallace Edition 6, stateside, we got a double feature of the U.S. cut and "The Bloody Dead" both from fullscreen video masters on DVD from Image Entertainment. When the film made the jump to Blu-ray in Germany as part of the Edgar Wallace Edition 7 and later in the thirty-six disc Edgar Wallace Gesamtedition it was once again without English options. Film Masters' 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen Blu-ray comes from a 4K scan of 35mm archival materials and sports some richly saturated colors at the expense of some detail. Blacks are often dull and sometimes lean towards the blue while the whites lean into yellow and there are a few shots possibly inserted from another source where the skintones vary from orange to reddish-pink. It is by no means a definitive presentation since it does not contain the German version but it is a fascinating document of one of the few German Edgar Wallace films to have U.S. theatrical release and a life beyond that.  As an Italian gothic throwback with little gore and nudity, Web of the Spider was a hard sell. While an English version trimmed from 110 minutes to 93 minutes was prepared, we have little data on its theatrical life apart from the disc's booklet mention of some 1975 screenings. What has been most widely availble is a center-cropped 16mm TV print further trimmed to 89 minutes that trimmed the murder of Elsie (Spirits of the Dead's Irina Maleeva) during which she is seen topless. The film made the rounds on the gray market VHS circuit but for some time the best-looking versions were a Greek-subtitled PAL VHS and an unauthorized DVD from Brentwood which were both sourced from the 16mm cropped TV print. A longer alternative turned up on DVD-R in Italian with English subtitles from the late, lamented Luminous Film & Video Wurks, but this Italian version was only partially-letterboxed and had Dutch subtitles burnt-in to the image underneath the added English ones. While the Italian version is owned by Movietime in Italy, we have no idea of their materials as they either have none or they have quoted too high a price to make DVD or Blu-ray release feasible. The only new film transfer for a time turned up in Germany from the boutique X-Rated Kult Video label which turned out to be a transfer of the 93 minute German version while the longer English-subtitled Italian version offered up in some of their editions multiple runs of two-disc and single-disc versions turned out to be a composite of the German transfer and an older Italian letterboxed tape master. When Garagehouse Pictures finally put the film out on Blu-ray in 2017, it was mastered from a 4K scan of 35mm materials for the 93 minute U.S. theatrical cut while the Italian version in the extras was again from an SD video source. Germany's multiple mediabook and keep case Blu-ray editions repurposed the Garagehouse master, an HD scan of the German version, and various video sources to recreated the Italian version as well as an expanded version that incorporated footage exclusive to the German version. Film Masters' 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen Blu-ray comes either from a new 4K scan of the same U.S. materials or from the Garagehouse raw scan with new grading as well as digitally-recreated opening titles that correct the spelling of Kinski's surname misspelled originally as "Kinsky" here and on foreign prints of some other Kinski films of the period but repeating the error of citing producer Addessi as "Addressi". While the 16mm prints leaned towards a yellowish-to-brown tinge, the newer transfers of the U.S. materials reveal that the color scheme was always rather subdued but now we have more vivid nocturnal blue hues that give the sequence of Foster making his way through the grounds to the castle some atmosphere more of which we can actually see including the firelight when Elizabeth shows Foster to his room, and what little blood there is onscreen finally pops. 
Audio
Creature with the Blue Hand has both lossless DTS-HD Master Audio and lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 choices that sound almost identical coming from the same source which had its limitations as a 35mm mono optical track. Post-dubbed dialogue is always clear, effects are sparse and primarily motivated by action more than ambiance, and the typically jazzy scoring has a bit of umph during the more frenetic passages as well as the playful organ bits. Optional English SDH subtitles are provided. Web of the Spider features English DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby Digital 2.0 mono tracks. The post-dubbed dialogue and canned sound effects sound clearer than the 16mm prints which had an underlying buzz which might have been a fault in the materials or the digitization of a video transfer that might have been a multi-generational dupe. The scoring has a nice presence, with the more bombastic portions of the score including the main titles no longer distorting at the high ends while the mix also makes more prominent the understated deployment of the romantic theme. Optional English SDH subtiltes are provided. 
Extras
Creature with the Blue Hand is accompanied by a new audio commentary by film historians Stephen Jones and Kim Newman who discuss the popularity of Wallace in Britain during his lifetime and in West Germany before and after the wars (and his continuing popularity to this day in Germany with many of his novels still in print there). They discuss the Rialto series and its offshoots, noting that this was the thirty-second entry but also sort of a "back to basics" take after their attempts at British/West German co-productions did not sell well domestically. They also discuss the rise of Kinski through the series from bit player to villain to hero, some of the other series regulars, and the appeal of England as seen by the West Germans where London fog and cobblestone streets co-exist with miniskirts and jazz clubs. In discussing the difference between the versions, they note that much of the film's comedy was removed from the English version, while also noting that there is more comedy here than in previous entries possibly as an attempt to compensate for the departure of series comic relief regular Eddi Arent. They also discuss the difference in visual imagination of the series' most prolific directors: this film's Alfred Vohrer (The Gorilla Gang) and Harald Reinl (Carpet of Horror). The disc also includes in its entirety (well, almost) "The Bloody Dead" video version (80:13) which adds new scenes featuring Denise Coward (Battle for the Lost Planet) as a nurse punished by Mangrove for trying to help David escape by being locked in a cell with two patients (effects artist Ed French and Bob Gutowsky) as a professor whose work was stolen by his colleagues who had him imprisoned and a Scotland Yard investigator who was subjected to Mangrove's experiments leaving him a drooling maniac, both of whom have a hunger for human flesh. Also added is a scene of a guard getting his arm ripped off when he tries to take the nurse's remains from the cannibals. These inserts not only look nothing like the rest of the film in terms of set design and acting but also photography which is colorful but looks like blurry 8mm at times compared to the dupe elements used for the feature itself. Also added are gore inserts for attacks by "The Blue Hand" including a torn throat shot for the guard who we see knifed in the stomach and gaping gut wounds for another victim. This is a reconstruction using the master for the theatrical version and film materials for the added bits, and it is inadvertently missing one of the inserts which is included in the raw footage in two takes (it is even pointed out in the commentary which was recorded using the older tape master). The titles that were added as video-generated cards on the video master have been digitally-recreated here while the rest of the credits unfold as they did on the theatrical version but with different music. The video version is also accompanied by an audio commentary by producer/new scenes director Samuel M. Sherman recorded for the Image DVD in which he reveals that Hemisphere expected to distribute Beast of the Yellow Night only for director Eddie Romero to sell it to the Corman and Lawrence Woolner company New World Pictures; whereupon Hemisphere/Independent-International sub-distributor Bev Miller reached out to him on Woolner's behalf about a support feature and Sherman aleady had the rights to the English-language version of Creature with the Blue Hand (then just known as "The Blue Hand") and drew up a contract to give New World theatrical rights only for five years only for Corman to try to get more when Sherman met up with him and new wife Julie Corman in New York. After New World's rights expired, Sherman sold the film to television but decided it was not viable for his Super Video line towards the end of that run. A few years later, however, a video distributor approached him interested in harder-edged gore films whereupon he decided to shoot new footage for the film in New Jersey in 1987 including the extra gore inserts. While it is recommended that fans sit through the "The Bloody Dead" for the commentary at least, all of the added material can be found separately in a raw & behind the scenes section (9:21) that features the raw scan complete with visible optical soundtrack and outtakes of the gore inserts. This is the only place you can see the one insert missing from the reconstruction.  "A Man of Mystery: Inside the World of Edgar Wallace" (13:34) is an interview with writer Pete Atkins (Hellraiser: Bloodline) who discusses the circumstances of Wallace's life born into poverty and becoming a journalist in colonies in South Africa, being one of the rare authors to promote his own work ultimately losing money on his first bestseller his work across genres, directing films, and scripting King Kong for which he is almost solely known today despite having once been a household name in the U.K. having authored hundreds of books and plays (which as has been pointed out elsewhere are still popular in Germany but not Wallace's homeland). "Kinski Krimis" (17:42) is an interview with filmmaker C. Courtney Joyner who notes how Kinski's early career had a lot of starts and stoppages due to his schizophrenia and that the Rialto series was his first regular gig as part of a sort of stock company of actors, some of whom would play regular characters or variations while others would turn up where needed. Kinski's rise in prominence in the series paralleled his growing prominence outside of Rialto including his roles in spaghetti westerns and more international productions with Creature from the Blue Hand not only featuring him in a dual role but also being one of the slicker and better-budgeted of a low-budget series. The disc also includes the U.S. theatrical trailer (1:49) and a re-created trailer (1:48) utilizing the new HD master of the feature. Web of the Spider is accompanied by an Since no English theatrical trailer has turned up, the disc includes a reimagined trailer (1:56) utilizing the 4K master of the feature with some well-chosen moments but unconvincing transitions and text, as well as a Castle of Blood theatrical trailer (1:42). 
Packaging
Housed with the discs is a liner notes booklet featuring "Creature with the Blue Hand and Germany's Undersung Branch of Genre Cinema" by Nick Clark who provide a primer on Wallace's popularity in Germany and the krimi genre and its various stages, noting the influence of the giallo genre in Creature with the Blue Hand that the krimis themselves had earlier influenced. Christopher Stewardson's "Cobwebs and Castles: Comparing Antonio Margheriti's Castle of Blood and Web of the Spider" does just that, couching the original film in the context of the other golden age Italian horrors and the industry during the time of the remake (noting Night of the Devils as another more modern take on an Italian golden age title in "The Wurdalak" episode of Black Sabbath). 
Overall
Film Master's Klaus Kinski double feature seems more convenient than thematic, although Creature with the Blue Hand does betray perhaps as much the influence of the giallo genre as the Italian Gothic while Web of the Spider is a throwback to Gothic at the height of the giallo cycle.
|
|||||
|