Life is short and you only live it once! That was my principal motivation to purchase a 33-DVD box set entitled "The Edgar Wallace Collection". Most of them are obscure and unknown euro-exploitation movies, but they all look deliciously sinister and entertaining. I'm watching them randomly, via a sort of bingo-system, and I was lucky enough to draw one starring my all-time favorite actor; - Klaus Kinski! Apparently, that wasn't too difficult. Kinski stars in approximately one-third of these films.
I am slightly familiar with the oeuvre of novelist Edgar Wallace, and can safely state that ("Creature with) the Blue Hand" is a prototypic work. It's a convoluted murder-whodunit, set in grim décors like spooky insane asylums and gothic family mansions full of secret passageways. Kinski plays a double role, identical twin brothers Dave & Richard Emerson, of which Dave is falsely accused of murder and submitted to an asylum. Someone unknown helps him escape, and simultaneously more members from the noble Emerson clan are brutally murdered by a killer who uses a blue gauntlet with sharp spikes. For once, Kinski doesn't portray the most diabolical character of the bunch. That honor goes to Carl Lange, who plays the sadist head warden of the asylum. He wears a monocle and keeps poisonous snakes in a safe in his office! Siegfried Schürenberg, in his familiar role as Sir John of Scotland Yard, ensures the obligatory comic-relief.
