NOTE: The below Blu-ray captures were taken directly from the Blu-ray disc.

ADDITION: Film Masters Blu-ray (October 2024): Film Masters have transferred Alfred Vohrer's Creature With The Blue Hand, Samuel M. Sherman's The Bloody Dead version plus Antonio Margheriti's Web Of The Spider to 2 dual-layered Blu-rays. The 1080P image quality of all three films have inconsistencies and Creature With The Blue Hand can look quite soft for about the first 5-10-minutes and have a green/blue leaning throughout. The Bloody Dead looks about the same and Web Of The Spider may be the best of the three, although most of the image doesn't carry significant depth, have shifting contrast and smack of a video-ish appearance. They can be soft but are watchable with reasonable colors and sporadic detail in close-ups. Imperfect but certainly passable.

NOTE: We have added 110 more large resolution Blu-ray captures (in lossless PNG format) for DVDBeaver Patrons HERE

On their Blu-ray, Film Masters use a DTS-HD Master dual-mono track (24-bit) in English language DUBs. The Bloody Dead has lossy Dolby. Creature With The Blue Hand has aggressive moments that come through via screams and the score by Martin Böttcher (The Treasure of Silver Lake), sounding ominous and creepy in the lossless transfer. The DUB'ing is both transparent and fairly weak. In Web of the Spider, most of the tension comes from the memorable score by mondo, giallo, horror, and 'pasta' film composer Riz Ortolani (Castle of Blood, How To Kill a Judge, Lightning Bolt, Killer Crocodile, The Pyjama Girl Case, The Valachi Papers, Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eyes, The McKenzie Break, Day of Anger, Il Sorpasso, Woman Times Seven, Cannibal Holocaust, The Voyeur, Mondo Cane) and it adds some Gothic horror atmosphere - an important part of the viewing experience. Film Masters offer optional English (SDH) subtitles on the features (for all three commentaries, as well) on their Region 'A' Blu-rays.

The Film Masters Blu-ray offers commentaries by the pairing of Kim Newman (author of Classic Monsters Unleashed) and writer/editor Stephen Jones (author of The Art Of Horror Movies: An Illustrated History) for Creature With The Blue Hand and Web of the Spider. They discuss Edgar Wallace and the German "Krimi" films, what has been cut (mostly comedy and some snippets of gore) from the German version, the entire series (comparing it to the Hammer franchise) and how they were rehashing plots and themes, The Dark Eyes of London (a "Krimi" of which they have also done a commentary on Network's Blu-ray) and they tell us to go to the Edgar Wallace pub if visiting London, England. Plus plenty on Antonio Margheriti's Web Of The Spider  including the cast; Anthony Franciosa, Michèle Mercier, Klaus Kinski, Peter Carsten etc. They are full of information and enthusiasm. It's always great stuff by the pair. The Bloody Dead has an achival commentary featuring Sam Sherman who re-shot this version and he shares plenty of details that they used to make it more bloody and gory - shot in East Orange, New Jersey in 1987. He tells the story of how and why. A Man of Mystery: Inside the World of Edgar Wallace is a 1/4 hour featurette directed by Daniel Griffith, discussing the career of the man who wrote King Kong, with screenwriter/film historian C. Courtney Joyner (The Savage B's: A Tribute to B-Horror) and Pete Atkins. Kinski Krimis: Inside the Rialto Film Adaptations is an 18-minute featurette with Joyner discussing the many Krimi series films with Klaus Kinski. Kinski's roles spanned multiple genres, languages, and nationalities, including Spaghetti Westerns, horror films, war films, dramas, and Edgar Wallace Krimi films. His life was complicated by a history of mental illness. There are an original 1967 trailer for Creature with the Blue Hand and a re-created trailer for the film plus ten minutes of The Bloody Dead raw footage & behind-the-scenes roll. The package has a 24-page booklet with essays by Nick Clark (Germany's Undersung Branch of Genre Cinema) and Christopher Stewardson comparing Antonio Margheriti's Castle of Blood to Web Of The Spider.  

Alfred Vohrer's Creature with the Blue Hand was based on the 1925 novel The Blue Hand by Edgar Wallace. Gregory reviewed Edgar Wallace Mysteries Volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. The Bloody Dead was Samuel M. Sherman's 1987 re-edited version with new gore inserts. They are housed on the first Blu-ray. Klaus Kinski plays twins Dave and Richard Emerson in both and also portrays Edgar Allan Poe (who partially narrates) in Antonio Margheriti's Web of the Spider (a color remake of Margheriti's 1964 film Castle of Blood) that is on the second Blu-ray of the Film Masters package. Creature with the Blue Hand has a police investigation of an asylum-escaping insane criminal (murdering the family gardener,) mystery-shrouded twin brothers and retractable knives via a heavy iron blue glove. It's doesn't carry much of the Krimi (German crime thrillers - many had a major influence on the Giallo) charm for me. If ghosts of the murdered inhabitants in a haunted mansion in Margheriti's (Battle of the Worlds, Seven Deaths in a Cat's Eye, Lightning Bolt, Cannibal Apocalypse) Web of the Spider, isn't enough for Web of the Spider - they reveal themselves to vampires with supernatural powers, requiring blood to maintain existence. Quite cool. The Film Masters package brings these curious Euro-culty horrors (the other connection is Klaus Kinski) to Blu-ray with great extras from the appreciated commentaries to the featurettes to the booklet essays. Genre fans should strongly consider.

Gary Tooze