gridoon2018 Yet another cautionary "scientists-shouldn't-try-to-play-God" sci-fi thriller; the first half strives for scientific accuracy, of sorts, and is a little too claustrophobic, but when Barbara Carrera (in a great breakout performance - I feel compelled to mention that she has a memorable nude scene as well!) enters the picture, it "opens up" and builds to a good shock ending. It moves slowly, but you don't really know where it's taking you; it's an advantage that there are no clear-cut "villains" in this story. Rock Hudson gives a committed performance in a genre unusual for him, and even that dog is an amazing actor. Be warned: the Mill Creek DVD print I watched is pretty awful. **1/2 out of 4.

Rrrobert Nonsensical nonsense but pretty entertaining too. The story is ridiculous with Rock Hudson's character stumbling upon a scientific breakthrough single handed, and having fetuses grow 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/assistant who is suspicious of Victoria and hates the dog! The most chilling (and high camp) scene has Ladd's character who has been staying with Rock's pregnant daughter-in-law, arrive home to the sprawling estate where she lives with Rock (and now Victoria) 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 that horrible lamp.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.

bkoganbing Rock Hudson's second venture in the science fiction genre after Seconds is Embryo a film that combines elements of the Bride of Frankenstein and Pygmalion in one rather weird film about for lack of a better word a test tube baby that grows up to be Barbara Carrera.Hudson is scientist experimenting in organic development and gets a chance to first experiment on his own Doberman pincher when it is accidentally hit by his car. Some pituitary secretions from the female dog are given to a prematurely born puppy and it grows remarkably into an adult. Exalted with his success, Hudson takes a fetus from a dead accident victim and gives it some of the same stuff.What he gets is Barbara Carrera. And she develops physically and intellectually at a prodigious rate. What she doesn't do is develop emotionally. Still Hudson passes her off as his new research assistant to friends and family like sister-in-law Diane Ladd, son John Elerick, and daughter-in-law Anne Schedeen. Embryo doesn't explore some of the real issues in this kind of science, it exploits them instead. The special effects as they are, are pretty second rate. Hudson looks like he lost interest in the project about halfway through the film.Now what would have really been interesting is if he had gotten boy child and it grew up to be a harlequin novel hero. Now that would have been something Rock Hudson could have sunk his teeth into.

Coventry First and foremost I'd like to state - for the record - that it's incredibly dumb to call your movie "Embryo" when the subject matter exclusively revolves on scientific research performed on fetuses (animal as well as human) aged 12-16 weeks. The embryonic stage is over at the end of the eighth pregnancy week and from that moment on the unborn critter enters the fetal phase. Okay, in all honestly, I didn't know all this, but I took the effort of looking it up and that's the also the least thing the creators of "Embryo" could have done. Don't worry; I'm not just stumbling over details or being exaggeratedly bitter, as there are several more reasons to state why "Embryo" is a huge failure. Actual science can be considered as boring and inaccessible, and thus Science Fiction is a cinematic genre created especially to make the otherwise tedious, yet educational science topics more interesting and comprehensible to larger audiences. By depicting ambitious scientific experiments that go horribly wrong, or space missions that encounter evil aliens instead of light-years of void, filmmakers usually manage to entertain people with spectacular special effects and, at the same time, teach them useful little trivia about science. In order to make a good or at least halfway-decent Science Fiction movie, writers and directors only have to comply with one basic rule: DON'T be boring! If they can't fulfill this one condition, the viewer might as well read a theoretically accurate book. Something must have gone wrong during the production of Ralph Nelson's "Embryo". The basic premise is potentially fascinating and even involving, as we're all sensitive about saving the lives of unborn babies. There also were some very prominent names involved in the production, like main stars Rock Hudson ("Giant", "Seconds"), Diane Ladd ("Chinatown", "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore") and director Nelson himself was responsible for the acclaimed classics "Soldier Blue" and "Charly". Then what went wrong? Simple. The script is irredeemably boring, clichéd and the whole thing looks incredibly foolish because the lab scenery & scientific equipment is clearly too primitive to achieve any medical breakthroughs with. Rock Hudson, in a very poor performance, plays a doctor who hasn't put any passion in his research work ever since his wife passed away. When his car hits a pregnant dog on a rainy night, his passion returns and he does everything possible to save the dying animals' fetuses. He manages to keep one fetus alive, impressively accelerates its growth process and trains it to become an extremely intelligent dog. Because his procedure is so successful, Dr. Paul Holliston convinces his friend at the hospital to repeat his tests with the human fetus taken from the womb of a pregnant teenager who committed suicide. The female subject unexpectedly keeps growing at a fast rate, however, and after only a couple of weeks she's a full-grown, ravishing and super-intelligent woman. The good doctor naturally falls in love with her, but the groundbreaking new growth treatment also begins to show horrible side effects... Absolute nothing happens during the first 45 minutes of the film, apart from a lot of implausible and overly melodramatic mumbo-jumbo and one or two deeply impressive tricks performed by the dog. That second half of the film does contain a little bit of (grotesque) action and suspense, but by then the stupidity of the dialogs and the implausible plot-twists already ruined the potentially fabulous Sci-Fi idea. There are some really cool scenes, most notably the chess-showdown between Victoria and Roddy McDowall (in a highly memorable and ultra-obnoxious supportive role). The grand finale is absurdly grotesque and literally on the verge of ridiculous, and it almost feels like Ralph Nelson put in that final disastrous shot because it was the general rule in contemporary thriller & Sci-Fi cinema. The last sequence, including the horrible freeze-frame shot at the end, certainly doesn't fit the tone of the previous 100 minutes of the film. But anyway, my sincere admiration and respect to the dog and his trainers. An animal with such intellect and talent surely deserved to demonstrate its tricks in a much better film.