As someone who loves science-fiction movies, it took me years to realize just how good I had it growing up as a teenager in the 1980s.
There was a seemingly never-ending supply of unexpectedly awesome B-grade movies, with new films like Flash Gordon, The Last Starfighter, Black Moon Rising and The Gate arriving every year.
That’s why I was actually excited to check out Kin, the feature-length debut of filmmaking brothers Jonathan and Josh Baker.
With its retro-throwback theatrical poster, the marketing push that proclaimed ‘From the producers of Stranger Things and Arrival,’ and its carefully-edited trailer that teased the discovery of some cool, new alien technology (a strange box-like gun), Kin showed just enough to whet the appetite of anyone (like me) who fondly remembers buying a ticket for The Wraith and having their head explode with geeky euphoria.
Well, folks, I’m here to tell ya — Kin is not a crazy-cool cult classic like its forebears some 30-plus years ago.
In fact, it’s pretty infuriating.
Imagine if you binged all eight hours of the first season of Stranger Things only to discover that the Duffer Brothers waited until the last 15 minutes to take you to the Upside Down, and you still never got a clear view of the Demogorgon.
Or if you sat through two hours of Amy Adams talking during Arrival without seeing any actual aliens.
Instead of going full-throttle with its sci-fi premise, Kin settles for being a ho-hum family drama for most of its overly long 102 minutes.
Yes, there is a cool alien ray gun that gets introduced almost immediately, but the Baker brothers fail to tell viewers anything — and I mean anything — about its origin or existence until the final 15 minutes. And, even then, there’s such a landslide of information, coupled with a genuinely surprising A-list cameo, that you end up feeling cheated and overwhelmed instead of overjoyed.
In fact, Kin feels like a halfhearted attempt to goose excitement for a sequel that actually explores all of the burning questions left on the cutting-room floor. Trust me, there won’t be a sequel to Kin.
The film’s failure is not for lack of a solid cast.
Kin completely squanders a welcome screen appearance by Dennis Quaid (who knows a thing or two about cheesy-good 1980s science fiction with Dreamscape and Enemy Mine) as blue-collar dad Hal Solinski.
Hal works construction in Detroit, where he struggles to raise his adopted African-American son, Eli (newcomer Myles Truitt), while his own, grown son Jimmy (Jack Reynor), a low-level thief, finishes up a six-year prison stint.
Early on, Eli goes out looking for scrap metal to sell to make extra money and comes across an abandoned office building littered with decimated bodies of strange soldiers in futuristic military garb. He also discovers the aforementioned ray gun, which he takes home so he can play Travis Bickle in the mirror.
No sooner than Jimmy is released, than he returns home and immediately runs into Taylor (James Franco), a wannabe drug kingpin, who lords over a white-trash family full of criminals. Taylor offered Jimmy protection while he was inside, and now he wants $60,000 for the trouble. Guess who doesn’t have a penny to his name?
As an aside, despite his recent public flogging for #MeToo misconduct, there are few actors who so fully embrace playing a kooky and dangerous redneck as Franco. He plays Taylor like the smarter, more vicious brother of Gator Bodine from Homefront.
Bad turns worse when Jimmy makes the boneheaded decision to tell Taylor that Hal has a safe full of cash in the construction office where he works. And, of course, Hal just happens to show up at his jobsite in the middle of the night. Guess who’s also there at the same time?
Suddenly, Jimmy and Eli are speeding west away from Michigan with Taylor in hot pursuit, only Eli thinks it’s just a vacation and that his dad is going to meet them out west in Lake Tahoe.
Meanwhile, Taylor, whose Neanderthal brother was killed in the botched construction robbery, hosts a Viking funeral pyre in his backyard, before declaring that he won’t sleep until Jimmy and Eli are dead.
I should probably mention that there also is a blink-and-miss brief scene where two more super soldiers, also dressed all in black in futuristic attire, arrive at the abandoned building. They deploy a cool holographic sphere that scans the building and recreates moments in time from energy particles left in the air, so they see that Eli has the ray gun.
Don’t worry or wonder about them, though. Kin doesn’t bother to introduce them, or explain who they are, until just before the credits.
In fact, for its first hour or so, you would have no idea that Kin was supposed to be a sci-fi movie at all, other than for Eli sneaking around that ray gun in his duffel bag.
Eventually, Jimmy and Eli make it to a mountain town where Jimmy decides to introduce his 14-year-old adopted brother to strippers at a danker-than-hell pit of a bar that I think was called The Miner’s Daughter, or something equally ridiculous.
There they meet Milly (Zoë Kravitz), the requisite stripper with a heart of gold, who for reasons that only happen in the movies, abandons her job and hits the road with the brothers after Eli — finally! — uses the ray gun to stop a bunch of locals from beating a drunk Jimmy to death.
Of course, once the gun is discharged, the two possibly alien super soldiers who maybe, might be from another planet are immediately notified, and they too set off in hot pursuit, traveling west as fast as possible.
And, it’s only at this point that Kin gets sort interesting, if only because the Baker brothers set up an old-school stand-off at a Nevada sheriff’s detention facility for the film’s big finale.
Basically, Taylor and his redneck brood, a shit-ton of cops, Jimmy and Eli and the ray gun, and the two possibly alien super soldiers all collide for what should have been a hell of a good fight, but instead, you get inundated with information overload about other worlds, a possible intergalactic messiah and one kind-of-cool wormhole.
Did I mention the surprising A-list cameo?
That role ends up being as wasted as Emmy-nominated Carrie Coon (Fargo, Gone Girl), who plays an FBI agent who also doesn’t show up until the last 15 minutes and who has like six total lines of dialogue, including, “Are you going to tell me about the gun? No? OK, this isn’t over.”
Actually, Carrie, yes — thankfully, by that point, Kin is over.
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at bloodviolenceandbabes.com, on Facebook or on Twitter.
This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 6, 2018.