Film Masters has put together an exciting blu ray with Creature of the Blue Hand, scanned in 4K from 35 mm archival elements, a new 4K scan of Web of the Spider and The Bloody Dead. Bonus features include commentaries on both movies by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman; reimagined trailers for Creature of the Blue Hand and Web of the Spider; a trailer for Castle of Blood; new documentaries on Edgar Wallace and Klaus Kinski’s acting in the Rialto krimi movies; an archival commentary for The Bloody Dead by Sam Sherman; raw and behind the scenes footage for The Bloody Dead and a booklet with essays by Christopher Stewardson and Nick Clarke.

You can get it from MVD.

Creature With the Blue Hand (1967): Based on the Edgar Wallace novel The Blue Hand and part of a long-running series of krimi adaptations by Rialto Film, this was bought by New World Pictures and issued as a double feature in the U.S. with Beast of the Yellow Night. Man, how good was life then?

Klaus Kinski plays Dave Emerson, who chokes out a nurse and escapes from a mental hospital before running to the castle of his twin brother Richard — also Kinski — as a black robed killer roams the grounds and kills people with his astounding blue claw with razorblades on the fingers, like something out of a giallo. For example, oh, Death Walks at Midnight. Or A Nightmare On Elm Street, which came 17 years after this.

Director Alfred Vohrer keeps things moving and it all looks gorgeous if indebted to Mario Bava. That said, aren’t all movies made after him? There’s also an incredible insane asylum sequence, featuring rooms filled with mice, rats and one female patient who just strips all day and night. This is the kind of movie world where you just want to live inside it, except that, yeah, there’s a killer on the loose and the cops are as always ineffectual.

Coming out just three years before giallo would surpass the krimi while using many of the same ideas from Edgar Wallace, this film reminds me that I need to get deeper into watching these German detective movies.

Creature With the Blue Hand later re-edited in 1987 with new gore inserts by producer Sam Sherman for his company Independent International — wow, I love that so much — and released to home video as The Bloody Dead. The extra scenes — almost ten minutes of new footage — were directed by Warren F. Disbrow and his father Warren Disbrow Sr.  You can learn more about that movie below.

Web of the Spider (1971): After Castle of Blood‘s disappointing box office, Antonio Margheriti felt he could remake the film in color and have it be more successful.

Edgar Allan Poe (Klaus Kinski) is our narrator and Kinski shows up for the beginning and the ending of the movie. He’s interviewed by Alan Foster (Anthony Franciosa), who challenges him as to the truth of his stories. This leads to a bed with Lord Blackwood (Enrico Osterman) about spending a night in his castle, a place where he soon meets Elisabeth (Michèle Mercier, Black Sabbath) and quickly falls into love — and bed — with her before she announces that she’s no longer alive.

There’s also Julia (Karin Field), William Perkins (Silvano Tranquilli) and Elisabeth’s husband,Dr. Carmus (Peter Carsten). The ghosts need his blood to come back to life, but Elisabeth helps him to escape, only for him to impale himself on the gate, dying just as Poe gets there.

I adore that the tagline of this is “Based on Edgar Allan Poe’s Night of the Living Dead.” He did write a poem “Spirits of the Dead” and the 1932 movie The Living Dead was based on Poe’s “The Black Cat” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” as well as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Suicide Club. But no, he has nothing to do with Romero’s movie.

I really like the soundtrack by Riz Ortolani but this can’t compare to the black and white — and yes, Barbara Steele appearance — in the original. That said, Kinski is awesome in every second he’s on screen, looking like a complete madman.

The Bloody Dead (1987): Warren F. Disbrow Jr. met Sam Sherman when he shot the interview footage for Drive-In Madness. That led to him being called to shoot new footage — 15 minutes worth — with Gene Reynolds and Tony Annunziata on remade asylum sets to make it appear that Creature With the Blue Hand wasn’t a movie made twenty years before as this was going to be released on VHS by Very Strange Video.

When this came out on DVD from Image Entertainment, Jim Arena wrote “”Sam needed to punch up the film with some gore to make the picture more appealing to modern-day audiences. That meant new scenes would have to be filmed. With a lucrative video distribution deal already on the table, Sam went to work and brought in associate Warren Disbrow to re-create the German asylum sets at his facilities in New Jersey. Hannibal Lector’s Silence of the Lambs institution cell recreation for 2002’s Red Dragon has been hailed for its precision, but Sherman and Disbrow’s attempt at duplicating Dr.Mangrove’s asylum, where most of the newly shot footage was intended to expand upon, is no less impressive. It is actually difficult to tell the difference between the two sets.”

Disbrow Sr. made a new version of the claw hand that the killer used and Ed French did the special effects. Other than the 15 minutes or so of new footage, this is almost the same exact movie, just with the added gore that late 80s audiences expected.