A woman wakes up from a con man and instructs her son to go back to the old family home and destroy all of her research and experiments. She then starts to ramble on about him having a brother of some sort which makes no sense as he has no siblings. With a few scientist friends, he heads out to her house in the country and it is not long before things go from strange to deadly as he learns that her studies have created a hybrid monster from his genes, one that could indeed be a brother to him if it was not a monster that was intent on killing all of them.

There are some that have claimed The Kindred has little to its plot and yet being a monster movie, it needs nothing overly complicated to do what it needs to. Most monster movies are simplistic in nature needing nothing more than knowing that there is a monster, that it is going to go on a rampage or do some killing or some such and that it will be up to the good guys with some sort of last-ditch effort to stop it. The same thing happens here but there is a fair amount of meat on the bones as the audience comes to know of the mother’s background, of the hybrids because there is more than one and that there is some crazy doctor, this time played by Rod Steiger who is intent on exploiting the situation. All of this is well and good and makes the hour-and-a-half running time move along at a fairly brisk pace, especially once the hybrid is revealed and looking to clean house in its own unique way.

A lot of creature flicks depend on their special effects to carry them through and here it was no different. They could have relied on shadows and trickery to get by but instead, they went with full practical effects and the results were quite good. The monster, named Anthony, was quite horrid and the makers of this film spared no expense on the slime and the goo to make it just a little more monstrous. There were moments where it seemed a little campy and unintentionally humourous, but for the majority of the picture, it turned out to be a lot of fun seeing this creature try to assert its dominance, to try and live without fear of death itself, for what were these people doing in this house other than to kill it? There is an additional scene starring Amanda Pays who has some sort of genetic problem of her own and it sees her transform into some sort of gill-woman before she finally succumbs to an ill-fated death.

As mentioned, Steiger stars in this film but takes a backseat to David Allen Brooks as the hero of the story and Pays as a fellow scientist who has an agenda of her own as she helps Steiger on his quest to obtain the hybrid. Kim Hunter is in the film for the briefest of moments as the ailing mother and Talia Balsam, Timothy Gibbs, Julia Montgomery and Peter Frechette round out the cast to make it all come to life under the direction of Jeffrey Obrow
and Stephen Carpenter. When the credits first rolled, one had to wonder just how good this picture was going to be considering it had five writers but when all was said and done, The Kindred made for quite the diverting time.

3.5 out of 5