This movie was on the way to being a lost film. Released theatrically in 1987, Stephen Carpenter and Jeffrey Obrow’s opus, The Kindred, hadn’t seen a home video release since the VHS days. But, Synapse Films dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s, and produced a 4K digital release in 2021. Good for them, because this is a creature feature that deserves to be seen.
Taking elements from monster flicks, cabin in the woods flicks, and mad scientist flicks, The Kindred follows a group of post-grad medicos who are trying to survive attacks from a gooey human/sea creature hybrid at a country house.
The group is led by John Hollins (David Allen Brooks), who recently lost his mother, research scientist Amanda Hollins (Kim Hunter, briefly), to a heart attack. On her deathbed, she begs John to go to her secluded house in the hills (played by the C.A. Mentry House in Stevenson Ranch, California), where she had been conducting experiments, and burn it all. She’s horrified at the results of the experiments, and ominously warns John of Anthony, a brother John never knew he had. Of course, this Anthony is the nasty creature who terrorizes the cast.
As for that cast, they’re typical for horror flicks of the day. They’re all young, good looking, and ready to be ripped apart in a horror film. Besides Brooks, key players are Amanda Pays as Melissa Leftridge, a stranger and admirer of Amanda Hollins’ work, who appears out of nowhere at Hollins’ funeral; Talia Balsam as John’s fiance, Sharon; and Timothy 
Gibbs (Hart), Peter Frechette (Brad), and Julia Montgomery (Cindy), who play colleagues from John’s hospital. Finally, besides Kim Hunter, the other big name in the cast is Rod Steiger, who plays Dr. Phillip Lloyd, another research scientist who has been a professional rival of Amanda Hollins’. No prizes awarded for guessing he’s the movie’s backup bad guy, as before the movie gets to the main plot, he’s shown to be a murderer.
It doesn’t take long after arrival at the house for things to jump off, credit to Carpenter and Obrow. The creature makes a menace of itself early, showing an uncanny cinematic ability to travel anywhere in the area at will and wherever the plot needed it. The creature is nasty work, too, designed and built by Michael John McCracken and his crew. Rarely can I cite an actual person when it comes to special effects, because of the size of the crews and inconsistent job titles, but McCracken’s work was so key to the film that his is the first name in the closing credits.
Seeing this movie, and then reading his sparse filmography on IMDb, I’m left scratching my head. The creature effects in this movie are top of the line for the era, when there were no assists from computers. Also, he worked on Ticks and Ice Pirates, two movies that also had good effects. Why does he have so few credits in the movie biz? I’ll leave that to another unpaid movie critic to explore.
Besides the creature effects, the death and gore in this flick will scratch a horror gorehound’s itch. This movie includes one of the most spectacular character deaths I’ve ever seen, which makes it worth checking out all on its own.
It’s the care and attention to detail in the effects work that really sells this movie. Not much else stands out, but, thankfully, there is not much else to criticize. There are plenty of horror flicks out there that nail the gore but then fall flat elsewhere. The Kindred doesn’t do that. The story is just unique enough to not be rote, and the cast didn’t have any duds. Sure, this movie is clearly a quick payday for Hunter and Steiger, but they didn’t mail it in. They showed contemporaries like Telly Savalas and Henry Fonda how to work for a day and cash a check like true professionals.
Bravo to all involved. Seeing The Kindred movie is far from revelatory, but it’s a fine addition to anyone’s October horror movie viewing.