O Embrião

"Embryo" has a touch of "Bride of Frankenstein" plus a pinch of "Lost Horizon", but all in all, I still find it a guilty pleasure.

Dr Paul Hollistan (Rock Hudson) is a genetic scientist who uses experimental growth hormones to speed up the growth of embryos. He has success with a dog, which becomes fully grown in no time at all. He then tries his luck on a human embryo and within a few days has produced a stunning Barbara Carrera. Not bad for his first human. He names her Victoria and sets out to educate her, finding that she absorbs information at a furious pace.

Of course, as devotees of horror/sci-fi well know, these kinds of experiments always have a catch and the growth hormone continues to accelerate Victoria's growth well past the hottie stage into old age; there are tears and screams before the final fade out.

The film has suspense: we wait to see people's reactions when Victoria explores her world and surprises them with her superior intelligence. The film starts stronger than it finishes, it has some interesting bits of pseudo science at the beginning with even a reference to DNA long before the acronym tended to pop up in every second sentence.

The presence of Rock Hudson gave the film a lift. The director, Ralph Nelson, had some big ones under his belt by this stage, and the film is many notches above the standard of many of the science fiction/horror movies that were around at the time.

I think Rock gave it some of the same juice he gave "Seconds" 10 years before; he ends up railing against fate at the end of both. "Embryo" was in that period between his big hits of the 50's and 60's, and before his career had a revival of sorts on television. However he was always watchable and had charisma to spare.

Barbara Carrera is captivating. She played a lot of femme fatales in her time, but that's fair enough; along with a sexy accent, she had a sensuous look that could easily cause turbulence amongst the male population. She works well with Rock, although she looks tiny alongside him despite the fact she was 5'8" (according to IMDb); he sure was a big dude.

"Embryo" is still worth a look even though there have been many variations on the theme over the decades, it doesn't outstay its welcome and the stars make it worth the effort.

I think this movie was WAY ahead of it's time. Very few people were aware of the scientific manipulations that could be done for development of new life.

Also it doesn't hurt that the leading actors are absolutely gorgeous. Barbara Carrera has nude scenes that even a woman can appreciate. What a goddess!

If you like sci-fi from olden times that mimics the life we are living now, you'll love this one.

That said, I agree with the other reviewer who noted that it was absolutely ridiculous to put in the scene about the natural language query to a computer that came back with a good answer. I worked with mainframes in 1976, and we were still feeding trays of punch cards into readers to run programs. CRT's were still command line interfaces.

There are a bunch of hater's for this movie for resistance to scientists assuming the role of gods.

I happen to be a Monsanto HATER, ABHORER, LOATHER, DESPISER!

Did ya'll know they "own," legally, but NOT morally IMO, a terminator gene, that renders their seeds unable to reproduce? Imagine if that gene got loose and started mutating flora and fauna. That could be the absolute end of life on our planet. Fortunately, our government, stupid and clueless as it is, has so far denied Monsanto the ability to deploy such a dangerous assault against us.

Watch "Bitter Harvest" with Ron Howard to see some of the corporate antics this toxic multinational corporation gets up to: contaminating (getting loose on) neighboring farms with their genetically modified seeds and pollen, then suing them for stealing their patented stuff. They get away with it, and have put many hard-working people out of business and off their land.

The whole question of man tampering with genetics and life support gets a superficial and at times idiotic treatment in this sci-fi yarn. Hudson plays a research scientist who's mourning the loss of his partner and wife who died in an accident years before. One rainy night, while tipsy and distraught, he runs down a pregnant Doberman. He brings it to his mansion/laboratory and tries to revive it, while also trying to save the lives of it's three unborn pups. He decides to utilize theories he and his wife had been working on (but were shelved after her death.) When this approach is partially successful, he tries it out on a human fetus, but the results go haywire. He winds up (within days) with the fetus transformed into long-haired Carrera! He then attempts to acclimate this ready-made person into society, but it isn't as easy as he had hoped it would be. He is soon in over his head and pays dearly for his tampering. The entire first section of the movie has a sort of detached, clinical viewpoint with a rather monotone Hudson dictating endless data into a recorder so that the audience can figure out (if it wants to!) what all he's doing to the dog and then to the fetus. This gets tiresome to say the least and it isn't helped by the dull surroundings of his lab. It all seems like a forced, pay-your-dues prelude to justify having the luscious, naked Carrera pop out later and seduce Hudson. (And wouldn't Hudson be more likely to have Jack Scalia slide out of the incubator?) For some inexplicable reason, Hudson's deceased wife's sister (Ladd) lives in the house as well. Their relationship is very fuzzily detailed and her character rarely makes sense. Fortunately, despite the lame scripting, Ladd brings enough presence and authority to the role that she manages to get a few good lines and icy stares out of her thankless part. (She has one ludicrous extended scene involving the search for the planet's ugliest lamp in the attic while a fierce, threatening dog growls at her.) Hudson actually looks pretty good in many of the scenes, especially the outdoor ones where the lighting is more flattering. He does an admirable enough job with his role in spite of the complete lunacy of the subject matter and the nonsensical actions of his character. (WHY is it necessary for the unborn fetus to know how to multiply a couple of numbers before it can even talk?!) Carrera has been given an impossible role to play. Nothing about her character makes any sense at all, yet she somehow brings conviction, believability and sympathy to the role. (It is never explained, however, why she has a heavy Nicaraguan accent. The poor lady was always playing oddities at this stage of her career. See "The Island of Dr. Moreau" as well...) She has one great sequence opposite McDowall at a party. (This hilarious party full of doctors and scientists even includes Dr. Joyce Brothers as herself!!!!!) Other roles go to Elerick as Hudson's son, Baggetta as a sly wolf with designs on Carrera and Schedeen as Hudson's pregnant daughter-in-law. Schedeen capped her place in sci-fi cultdom when she went on to play the surrogate mom of "ALF". The film is moderately entertaining if one doesn't think about any of the science involved. Even so, it could have been a lot better with a higher budget, stronger script and better direction. One potentially disturbing moment involving a dogfight is rendered fall-down hilarious due to the usage of a preposterous stuffed terrier as a stunt double.

This film has aged as gracefully as Mickey Rourke. The special effects are hilariously bad, the lab equipment belongs in a museum and the plot is dubious to say the least. And yet, these are the very things that make "Embryo" such entertaining viewing.

I think it's only fair to judge special effects in old movies by the technology available to the filmmakers at the time. However, even by 1970s standards, the special effects in this film are remarkably unconvincing. The obvious use of dolls for babies, the fluffy toy that doubles for a dog and the mesmerising plastic canine foetus are all memorable. Personally, I find these kind of effects utterly charming. They inject humour into the film (albeit unintentionally) and due to their lack of authenticity, make the subject matter of experimenting on foetuses more palatable.

Technology junkies will love the bus sized computers and pre-historic lab equipment. The film's heartening lack of moralising is almost as much of its time as the outdated hardware. I hate to think how preachy this film would be if it were made today.

This film is a bizarre and amusing time capsule of 1970s technology and morality. See it, if only for the bewildering dog foetus.

Okay, I'll admit it--you need to suspend disbelief on this one--A LOT of disbelief! But, you have to do this all the time in movies so stretching this just a bit further might enable you to enjoy this film. I know that I went in with very low expectations after reading the IMDb reviews, but it turned out to be a decent little movie about yet another doctor who wanted to play God.

The film begins with a doctor (Rock Hudson) hitting a dog. He takes the pooch home and tries to save it, but he's unsuccessful. But here's the weird part--using some special serum he'd been working on, he injects the dog's surviving puppies to try to save it. That's because the puppy is WAY too young to survive. Speeding up its growth at an astronomical rate enabled the puppy to grow many weeks in a matter of hours and it survives.

A short time later, the doctor decides to play God with a human. Taking a recently dead pregnant woman, he's able to remove the small fetus and grow it in his lab at an even faster rate. The problem is that for some time he cannot stop its fast growth and the fetus ends up becoming a full-grown woman by the time he's arrested the fast growth. At first, things seem great as the woman is a sort of super-woman--with amazing learning skills and intelligence and the ability to be well-coiffed despite being raised in a lab. Plus, and here's the best part, it turns out to be an amazingly HOT young lady (Barbara Carrera). What's next? Well, I'd say more but don't want to spoil the plot. Suffice to say that the lady's moral reasoning abilities are at times VERY suspect...yet hot! Despite the prologue that makes it sound as if this technology is possible, it certainly is not! But, it did make for an interesting film with a few nice surprises (such as at the very end). A word of note--you WILL see a lot of Miss Carrera in this one, so perhaps it's best not shown to your small children or mother!