Embryo (1976)

Embryo (1976)

Directed by: Ralph Nelson

Starring: Rock Hudson, Barbara Carrera, Diane Ladd

Nowadays the concept of artificial pregnancy or “test tube babies” or something in that vein is fairly mainstream, but back in the 70’s was when all the real useful preliminary research about in vitro fertilization was going on. And whenever there’s a new science being researched, science fiction will step up to the plate and come up with a bunch of crazy what-if’s about that science. Embryo is one of these, although from a modern perspective, they probably could’ve done a little more to spice it up.

The movie starts with Rock Hudson accidentally hittin a dog on his way home. Luckily, he’s a mad scientist, and he brings the dog home and manages to save one of the puppy fetuses it had in it. Using a magic formula, the dog grows to adulthood within days, then stops it’s rapid growth and begins growing like normal. Of course, this prompts the scientist to try the same thing with a human fetus, which he does. This time the girl grows up to be about 21 before she stops growing (because if it was just a little girl, there’d be no possibility of creepy scientist-on-patient sex. Ugh). What he didn’t notice was that the dog was actually kinda evil, and the woman, though ridiculously smart, seems to have no morals.

Now, that could’ve been a just fine setup for a horror movie, where the scientist plays god and is rewarded by making a person who’s inhuman and evil and whatever. Instead, the movie just kinda hangs out for a bit, plays chess with Roddy McDowall, and instead decides to give the woman a drug addiction. There are a couple scenes where the girl almost kills a lady for no reason, but they’re dropped in favor of the third act reveal where she has to eat a fetus or something so she can get over this drug addiction. It kinda feels like the first and second halves of the movie were written by different people and independent of one another.

Unfortunately, the movie actually had a good setup for what could’ve been a pretty decent (if predictable) horror flick. Maybe they just wanted to do something unexpected, but in that case, why even throw in all the stuff at the beginning with the dog being evil and the girl almost killing someone for no reason? By the way, my absolute favorite part of this movie was early on, the dog (which was a doberman) is confronted by a little yappy dog that… yaps at it. Suddenly, the doberman leaps at it and shakes it around like a chew toy… which it obviously is at that point. That didn’t make it any less hilarious, though.

So… I guess I’m not really sure what my overall feelings were. It definitely had more potential to it, and I wouldn’t watch it again, so I guess I wouldn’t recommend it. Except maybe for that dog thing, and the weird Roddy McDowall cameo where he DEVOURS the scenery while playing chess. That was fun.