THE KINDRED (1987): A Homebrew Horror Crew's Epic Moment

Horror filmmaking has always been a place where new filmmakers could find a breakthrough that other parts of the filmmaking world would deny them. Filmmakers as diverse as George Romero, Sean Cunningham and Charles B. Pierce emerged from obscurity and made a distinctive horror hit that allowed them to build a directing career. Even those who enjoyed more modest success were often able to get a string of films out into the marketplace before low-budget genre fare was forced into the direct-to-video world for good.One of Schlockmania's favorite examples is the team of Jeffrey Obrow and Stephen Carpenter. This directing duo actually made an entire feature, The Dorm That Dripped Blood, during a holiday between semesters in film school and got it distributed. Utilizing a collaborative team made up of fellow students, they made a few more films that played theaters and enjoyed a long home video afterlife before everyone went their separate ways.The Kindred was the last film Obrow and Carpenter co-directed and it's easily the most ambitious of their self-produced horror ventures. The plot replaces the usual teenagers or generic undergrads with a group of young genetic research scientists(!). The leader of the group is John (David Allen Brooks), who receives a deathbed request from his scientist mother (Kim Hunter) to go up to their vacation home and destroy all records and evidence of an old experiment.John takes a group of friends to the house to help him with this task as well as his fiance Sharon (Talia Balsam) and Melissa (Amanda Pays), a mysterious young researcher who admired his mother's work. He doesn't know he faces two big obstacles. The first is Dr. Lloyd (Rod Steiger), a jealous and unethical former colleague of his mother's who wants to steal her work and revive her experiments. The second is "Anthony,"  the brother that his mother never told him about. He's got a lot to do with the mystery of her experiments. In fact, Anthony was her ultimate experiment in genetics and he's very much alive...One of the most fun aspects of the Obrow/Carpenter movies is their desire to please their target audience. They were very attentive to what was going on in the horror market during the first half of the '80s and tailored their work towards delivering the goods to the Fangoria crowd with as much ambition as their modest budgets would allow. The Kindred shoots the works in this respect: in the confines of a single storyline, they combine the mad scientist film, a constantly mutating set of Alien-style monsters, elements of the "old dark house" subgenre and even a dash of the slasher flick. The story can feel a little disjointed at times, maybe light on characterization, but the way it keeps mutating like its central creature Anthony ensures it is never dull.The Obrow/Carpenter team also shows considerable ambition in the production itself. There's a strong score by David Newman, soon to become a Hollywood soundtrack regular, and the cinematography, handled by Carpenter himself, gives the film a pro-level slickness. They were more attentive to getting good actors than a lot of horror filmmakers working at their budgetary level, something reflected in the use of familiar faces like soap star David Allen Brooks, Talia Balsam and Revenge Of The Nerds series alum Julia Montgomery.They also had enough budget to bring a couple of old school actors in Hunter and Steiger: the former does classy, affecting work in her brief role and the latter gets to do the scenery chewing he was famous for in his later scenes. Among the newcomers, Pays does the most memorable work with the script's most intriguing and enigmatic characterization - and Peter Frechette steals a few scenes as the most humor-inclined of the young scientists.However, the big ticket attraction here for genre buffs lies in how Obrow and Carpenter handle their genetic horror. They were as attentive to delivering the goods as they were to their budget and came up with a solid approach where the creature effects are gradually doled out. Attacks come at strategic points in acts one and two, the most memorable being a scene that combines a tentacle-swinging beast with a nubile coed, a moving car and a watermelon (yes, a watermelon - you've never seen a creature attack like this). The third act goes for broke with an elaborate, interlocking batch of setpieces that involve large-scale latex puppet creature effects by the dozen, the destruction of large sets, buckets of methylcellulose slime and some big explosions.In short, The Kindred is a fun monster flick that infuses b-movie thrills with A-movie technical proficiency, topping it off with an oddball creativity that gives it a handcrafted touch. Watching it three-plus decades later, there's also a certain poignancy going on here as this film came from the last era when ambitious low-budget filmmakers could mount an elaborate production like this, achieve everything with analog effects and get wide distribution for it. If you're burnt out on studio-driven franchise genre fare, this quirky yet slick handcrafted effort offers a nostalgia trip worth taking.Blu-Ray Notes: The Kindred spent decades out of circulation after the VHS era but has recently been revived and lovingly restored by Synapse Films. An in-depth blu-ray review will follow next week: in the meantime, rest assured that the transfer looks great and the presentation is fleshed-out with a gaggle of worthwhile extras.https://youtu.be/Vg8IJgbSr0o