Embryo

Entertaining nonsense where Rock Hudson learns the secret of growing fetuses to adulthood with the offspring super-fast learners, highly skilled and super intelligent.

The Doberman which is the first successful offspring is a fabulous character (like the diabolical dog in The Omen.) She is beautifully trained and does some great stunts, and is chilling in other scenes. The second success is Victoria (Barbara Carrera) who - surprise - is a stunning beauty. Carrera is good in the role and creates a believable character.

Diane Ladd provides great support as Rock's cynical sister-in-law/live-in assistant who is suspicious of Victoria, and hates the dog. The most chilling (and high camp) scene has Ladd's character, who has been away, return to Rock's estate to rummage through the attic and retrieve a hideous frog-shaped lamp, only to be followed by the snarling dog the entire time. The dog carefully escorts Ladd from the premises, clearly glad to be rid of the ugly light fitting.

The opening scenes are rather dull, padded out with Rock endlessly recounting plot exposition into his refrigerator sized reel to reel tape recorder. The film really begins to feel like a TV movie with its tiny cast and few locations. But once Victoria's up and talking (and disrobing) the pace and interest picks up.

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!

"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 really enjoyed this movie.i thought the acting was very good,and the storyline well developed.i'm sure the movie was inspired by past literary works and movies,but i think it also inspired other movies and novels.so,obviously it's not wholly original,but it does have its own original elements to it.it's a cautionary tale for sure and it's just as relevant today, probably more so .the only negative thing i can say about it is that it can be a bit slow,and the first half has an almost clinical feel to it.by this i mean at times it's a bit dry and almost too scientific.overall,though i think it was a well done movie.i give Embryo a 7/10

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.