MOVIE REVIEW : ‘THE KINDRED’: FRIGHTENING YET FRUITFUL

Who says progress isn’t ever onward, ever upward? Who says the movies keep repeating the same formulas over and over, running them into the ground and six feet under?

Maybe they do . . . most of the time. But every once in a while you see something new, something startling. If you squint hard, you’ll catch it in “The Kindred” (citywide).

What is it? Well, it’s not the plot. Basically, “The Kindred” is about a Mad Scientist, whose total lack of morality helps unleash on the world a murderous monster that runs hideously amok, killing everything and everyone in sight.

The monster isn’t new, either. It’s the same mucous, slimy, wild-eyed pile of glop we’ve been seeing for years--but wilder, gloppier and more expensive.

It isn’t the locale--an old, isolated, abandoned summer place, the home of fiendish experiments, deformed monstrosities in bottles and what seems miles of swampy monsters’ burrows.

It isn’t the characters. Besides the aforementioned mad scientist, we have his psychopathic blackmailing assistant, his horrified, dying colleague, her clean-eyed, jut-jawed son and the son’s pert, perky fiancee. (There is one mildly new wrinkle, a group of beach-party-hearty hunks and hunkettes whom the film makers, in their droll way, try to palm off as young research scientists.)

It isn’t the level of violence. That’s mind-boggling, gratuitous and grotesquely bloody throughout--mid-’80s Hollywood norm.

Nor is it writing nor direction. Co-scenarists and co-directors Jeffrey Obrow and Scott Carpenter seem determined you’ll never forget they’re the team that brought you “The Dorm That Dripped Blood.”

And it isn’t the acting. After all, back in the 1950s, Rod Steiger (the mad scientist) and Kim Hunter (his horrified colleague) were giving stellar performances in support of Marlon Brando in, respectively, “On the Waterfront” and “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Now, in our more enlightened times, they’re playing supporting roles to a pile of murderous mucus. (Stanislavsky, where are you?)

So what is new, or different, or surprising about this gory bore (rated R)? Well, in one scene, a minor character, one of the hunkettes, drives down a deserted road, only to be attacked, strangled and eviscerated by a mad watermelon. We’ve never seen anything like that. Have you?