I love genre cinema. I will always have a soft spot for horror, action, sci-fi, and all the subgenres that exist inside those larger categories. What I never used to feel any real connection to are those films that exist in the realm of pure sleaze. You know the ones: the films from the ’70s and ’80s, filled with ugly violence and sex that is the opposite of titillating, usually shot on cheap film stock with semi-amateur casts. But knowing these films have a large following and several companies devoted to restoring them made me wonder what I was missing. With that in mind, I started a deep dive into the world of sleazy exploitation that continues to this day. This is My Exploitation Education. Today’s lesson is THE KINDRED.
Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. A research scientist takes his girlfriend and a group of eager young interns to an isolated location to investigate an abandoned experiment. What they find is that the experiment is not as dormant as they thought and before you know it, a slimy creature is knocking off folks by shoving tentacles up their noses and ripping out their throats. Yawn. Been there, watched that, right?
Alright, to be a little less snarky and add some much-needed context for the rest of this piece, here’s a slightly more detailed setup for what you’re in for when you hit play on THE KINDRED.
Research scientist John (David Allen Brooks) learns from his mother Amanda (Kim Hunter), while she is on her death bed, that she was conducting a potentially dangerous experiment in her home and that she needs him to destroy her work. After Amanda’s death, John goes to her house along with his girlfriend Sharon (Talia Balsam) and a crew of stereotypical interns/cannon fodder. His goal is to study his mother’s work, not destroy it as she told him to. Oh yeah, and there was also Amanda’s claim that he had a brother he didn’t know about named Anthony skulking around the property somewhere. Surely that can’t be good news.
Despite the formulaic nature to the overall plot of THE KINDRED, there’s a pleasantly haphazard nature to the film that is due primarily to two reasons. The first is that it took five writers (including Joseph Stefano of PSYCHO fame) and two directors to wrangle together a basic “mad scientist’s experiment gone awry” story with barely sketched characters stumbling through what’s essentially a ‘50s sci-fi/horror B-picture updated to the waning days of Reagan’s America. The second reason is that it is just so much fun to watch Rod Steiger ham it up instead of sleepwalking through a paycheck gig for the veteran Oscar-winner.
For some reason, co-writers/directors Stephen Carpenter and Jeffrey Obrow decide to open THE KINDRED with a car accident that includes a fiery explosion followed by a car chase that ends with the body of the driver in the car accident being stolen from an ambulance by a shady henchman type. With the pyrotechnics and stunt work involved in these two sequences, it looks like half the budget for the movie has already been used up. Given the resources expended and the fact the movie begins with these sequences, you would assume that they are important to the storyline. You would be wrong.
There are little storytelling choices like this that leave the viewer scratching their head. Why does John go to fellow scientist Dr. Goode (Steiger) for advice after telling Sharon that he and his mother had a bad falling out when they worked together? Why does John search high and low for anything related to Amanda’s experiments but he never thinks of checking the basement of her house? What the hell was the goal of the research in the first place? I can’t imagine Amanda just wanted to create a huge tentacled monster that she named Anthony.
But creature features at this budget level are rarely that concerned with logic or a coherent plot and for me, the way THE KINDRED embraces the inherent cheese of its DNA is endearing. For here is a movie that understands why I decided to watch it in the first place and delivers on its promise. What promise? The kind of slimy, gooey practical effects that ‘80s genre films specialized in and that Rod Steiger would bring some entertaining bombast.
Sporting one of the saddest hairpieces in cinematic history, Steiger’s evil Dr. Goode (yes, they gave the villain a punny nickname) presents a milquetoast presence at first but quickly evolves into the snap of the tail the otherwise staid first act of the movie needs. We are never certain what Goode’s research is, but he dissects screaming creatures that look like skinless rats crossed with the baby from ERASERHEAD while they’re still alive and feeds a disloyal henchman to some mutants that he has hidden in a cell behind his office wall. And this is after he gives Amanda a fatal heart attack by bellowing at her in that way that only Steiger can do that seems to erupt from his soul.
Spoilers Ahead
All of Dr. Goode’s evil machinations would seem to set him up for an epic death at the hands of Anthony. While Anthony does drag Goode to his death in a pit of fetid water and sewage, Steiger suddenly switches gears and plays his demise with completely unearned pathos, crying out in sympathy to the mortally wounded Anthony, seemingly more saddened by the creature’s impending death than he is by his own. Of course, this being a low-budget creature feature from 1987, Steiger gives his off-kilter, fully committed performance while gallons of slime are dumped on his head in a glorious visual.
Goode’s death scene achieves something that rarely happened in genre fare of this era: one moment that encapsulates the film as a whole. It’s silly, looks a little cheap, takes a surprisingly out-of-left-field approach to a familiar beat, and is oddly satisfying. If you are looking for an under-the-radar genre flick from the ‘80s with a random scene of a woman turning into a fish, you could do a lot worse than THE KINDRED.
Tags: Amanda Pays, David Allen Brooks, David Newman, Earl Ghaffari, Horror, Jeffrey Obrow, John Penney, Joseph Stefano, Kim Hunter, Michael McCracken Sr., Rod Steiger, Sci-Fi, Stephen Carpenter, Talia Balsam, The 1980s
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