Burl reviews The Kindred! (1987)

Hi, Burl here to review a crazy movie from the VHS era: The Kindred! I remember seeing this one in the theatre, and of course I had to sneak in because I was apparently too young to witness such graphic sliminess! But witness it I did anyway, there in the flickering temple, and, as I recall, all it did was make me let loose with a hearty ha ha!

The story is as follows: an elderly experimental biologist, Amanda, played by Kim Hunter from The 7th Victim, is dying, and she tells her son, also a scientist, that he must go back to the old family house and dispose of her experiments! What she doesn’t tell him is that the experiment consists of a big slimy guy with tentacles, bug eyes and fish-teeth! Also, an evil doctor played by The Pawnbroker himself, Rod Steiger, wants to get his hands on the creature, along with all the other little rubber creatures who live in the house too!

So John, the son, takes a bunch of his associates and his girlfriend, Talia Balsam from The Supernaturals, along with a British lady who’s into fish experimentation herself, up to the house to go through and dispose of the experiments! (The British lady is played by Amanda Pays, who would grapple with fish mutations again in Leviathan, ha ha!) Well, soon enough there are tentacles whipping around and people getting attacked, and one character turns out to be a fish monster! I’m not kidding, she grows gills and everything! And as I mentioned before, there’s an awful lot of goo that gets sprayed around, much of it onto The Pawnbroker’s hat!

This movie might have been a small classic of the era along the line of Night of the Creeps or C.H.U.D. or Pumpkinhead if only it had a little more energy and humor, and maybe a dash of gore or sleaze! There are some mutants that The Pawnbroker keeps around, which we see near the beginning of the movie, who add some of these qualities, but then we never see or hear about them again! Ha ha, it’s not that it’s such a terrible movie – it’s great to see The Pawnbroker hamming it up, and also the ape-lady from Planet of the Apes is in there for a while – but there’s a sluggishness to it, and a sense of wasted potential! Maybe that’s why it’s never been released on DVD or any newer formats, insofar as I know, anyway!

I should note that there is an actor in the movie named Bunki Z! I wasn’t sure who Bunki Z played, or whether Bunki was a man or lady, but it was a nice surprise in the opening credits! I’m assuming, though, that Bunki gets some slime on him/her at some point in the movie, because pretty much everyone does, so I award this movie a fulsome ha ha! and two slime-covered Bunki Zs!