Creature with the Blue Hand (1967)

Original title: Die blaue Hand

A late entry in Rialto series of krimis, macabre crime thrillers based on the work of British writer Edgar Wallace that had started in 1959 with Der Frosch mit der Maske/The Frog with the Mask. The series was hugely popular in Europe, becoming increasingly outlandish and more horror-oriented as it went along. Directed by old hand Alfred Vohrer who had been working on the series since Die toten Augen von London/The Dead Eyes of London in 1961, Creature with the Blue Hand was based on Wallace’s 1925 novel The Blue Hand and featured series regulars Klaus Kinski (in a dual role) and Siegfried Schürenberg.

The English language title is a misnomer as there’s no “creature” with a blue or any other colour hand though the black cloaked killer, with a single eye peering through a hole in his hood, sports a rather fetching, pre-Freddy Kreuger set of metallic claws that have a blue tinge to them. He turns up part way through the film which begins with British aristocrat Dave Emerson (Klaus Kinski) being found guilty of murder and sentenced to incarceration in a psychiatric hospital run by Dr Mangrove (Carl Lange). He finds no support from his family, Lady Emerson (Ilse Steppat), cousins Robert (Peter Parten) and Charles (Thomas Danneberg) and Dave’s identical twin brother Richard (Kinski again) and only his cousin Myrna (Diana Körner) offers a crumb of sympathy. Dave assumes the identity of Richard to find out who really committed the crime he was accused of but the family are soon being stalked by a hooded murderer who kills using a steel claw. The plot becomes increasingly convoluted as Dave and Inspector Craig of Scotland Yard (Harald Leipnitz) piece together the clues and unmask the killer.

Creature with the Blue Hand has something of a lowly reputation and although it’s true that it’s not quite as engaging as the best of the krimis and the English dub does nothing to help, it’s chock full of incident, a lot of it admittedly quite silly, but always entertaining. In fact there’s often so much going on, with so many twists and turns that should you allow your attention to waver for a second you could end up completely lost. As the convoluted mystery is slowly and tortuously unravelled we get a room full of dummies re-enacting murder scenes, a John Carradine-like butler (Albert Bessler) who inexplicably hangs out on a cupboard, raging thunderstorms, cloaked killers with a metal claw, secret passages accessed by a coin-operated lock, a manic jazz score, a gloomy Gothic castle and double Klaus Kinski – what’s not to love?

If that’s not enough the heroine is cast into a cell full of rats into which is dropped several dozen snakes, a nurse is driven mad by a snake bite and in the film’s oddest moment, we get a guided tour of the asylum, meeting a woman who compulsively strips for the peeping staff members (“this is really interesting!”), a child-killing mother who repeatedly re-stages her crimes using a doll, and a hulking, one-eyed brute.

All this and it’s still a relatively subdued by krimi standards. It’s a very silly film but one that’s atmospherically shot (Kinski’s escape from the asylum through fog-shrouded woods is particularly nicely done), Vohrer’s penchant for a roaming camera put to good use throughout. The wild climax tips right over into Gothic territory as our heroes explore the secret chambers beneath the castle, finding dolls and skeletons along the way and the identity of the Blue Hand is revealed (it wasn’t hard to guess) all accompanied by comically emphatic musical cues. Martin Böttcher’s score starts off with a slightly out of tune rendition of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor before morphing into a horn-driven jazz piece straight out of a contemporary Eurospy thriller which thunders away in the background even at the most inappropriate of moments.

It’s set in the late 1960s but apart from a few early rumblings about rebellious youth and the obligatory young woman in a mini skirt it could really have been set in a Hammeresque Gothic setting and still work – maybe work better in fact. The castle never looks once like anything you’d find the UK (the film was shot at Spandau Studios in Berlin) but it makes for a nicely old-fashioned setting that Vohrer and his director of photography Ernst W. Kalinke sometimes wash with Mario Bava inspired primary colours.

It all ends with a very strange in-film advert for the next film in the series, the luridly titled Der Mönch mit der Peitsche/The Monk with the Whip, the perfectly offbeat and unexpected ending to a daft but hugely entertaining bit of nonsense that tries – and to a degree succeeds – in fusing the very contemporary krimi to the tried-and-trusted old-dark-house chiller.

A cut version toured the States on a double bill with Filipino import The Beast of the Yellow Night in 1971. A version released much later under the title The Bloody Dead adds new footage, shot two decades after the fact by Sam Sherman and his Independent International company.