Embryo

Plot synopsis:
Dr. Paul Holliston (Hudson) is a geneticist who has been living alone in his rambling clinic, which he operates out of his home, after losing his wife in a car crash. This leads to his feeling constant pangs of guilt from his sister-in-law Martha Douglas (Diane Ladd), who has become his assistant.
One night, Holliston runs over a pregnant doberman dog. The dog is fatally injured, but Holliston manages to save one of her unborn puppies by gestating it in an artificial uterus. Because the device still requires nutrients to be supplied by the mother, he must drastically shorten the gestation period: to this end, he uses an experimental growth hormone made from human placental lactogen, which speeds up the embryo's growth.
The doberman grows to adult size in a few days, and Holliston passes it off as the mother to disguise his secret experiments. Thanks to the serum, it learns incredibly fast and soon becomes a well-trained dog. However, Holliston fails to notice that the animal's aggression is increasing commensurately: while he is out on an errand, it kills an annoying small dog and conceals the carcass.
Eager to use his discovery for the good of mankind, Holliston applies the same technique to an unborn human extracted from a suicide victim. However, the subject's cells age uncontrollably, so Holliston uses the highly addictive drug methotrexate to counter the effect. It works, and the embryo grows into a 24-year-old woman he names Victoria (Carrera).
Holliston educates Victoria, and she soon gathers photographic encyclopedic knowledge of science, literature and culture. He begins introducing her to his friends and coworkers as a University of Colorado graduate, and she wows them with a riveting game of chess against chess champion Riley (McDowall), infuriating him when she deliberately lets him win the final move at Holliston's subtle urging. Holliston completes Victoria's education by engaging in sex with her at her encouragement.
Soon afterwards, Victoria discovers the rapid aging of her cells has resumed and becomes addicted to the methotrexate to stave off her deterioration. Thanks to a chance meeting with the manager of Teletex International computer systems at a party, Victoria is able to access the most advanced computer system in the state which informs her that she can counter the aging with pituitary gland extract from a 5 to 6 month old human fetus. In addition, Martha has grown jealous of Victoria's success, and finds out the University of Colorado has never heard of her. Before she leaves for Minneapolis, Victoria poisons her with methotrexate in order to keep her origin secret. Shortly after Martha's departure, Holliston is informed of her fatal heart attack.
Holliston leaves to meet with Martha's coroner. Meanwhile, Victoria destroys all of Holliston's research records and tapes concerning his experiments. Victoria murders a prostitute to get her unborn child. However, the records indicated the child was already dead in the womb and unviable for her needs. When the autopsy reveals that Martha's death may have been a homicide, Holliston hurries home and alerts his son Gordon to meet him there to go after Victoria. He finds Victoria, now middle-aged, having surgically removed his daughter-in-law Helen's baby. When he attempts to capture her she stabs and kills Gordon, sending the gestating tank containing the baby crashing to the floor.
Now determined to kill Victoria, Holliston gets in a car chase after her. When a now-elderly Victoria crashes her car, Holliston pulls her out to finish her off, but paramedics intervene and discover the geriatric victim is in labor. As she is being carried away, she reveals that she is pregnant with his baby, causing Holliston to cry out for her death in despair. As the scene fades to black, the cry of a newborn child is heard.

Tags: romantic, murder

Review:
Rock Hudson plays a widowed scientist who runs down a pregnant dog whilst driving in a storm.
Roddy McDowall has a funny guest appearance as a chess whiz who gets thrashed at his favourite game by the super-intelligent Carrera.What I dislike about this movie is that as it goes on, it starts to go for cheap shocks and unpersuasive horror touches, rather than maintaining the accent on the science fiction side of the story.
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.
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 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.
(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.
(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.
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.
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.
The basic idea is excellent but the execution is appallingly bad, with a constantly illogical sequence of scenes, an ending that is almost laughably melodramatic and poor Rock Hudson wanders through this with an understandably confused look on his slightly sagging face.
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.
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.
Rock Hudson plays a scientist whose personal guilt over his wife's death drives him to experiments in his private lab that attempt to save the lives of fetuses trapped in the bodies of dying females.
His methods lead the fetus to develop rapidly into an adult (Barbara Carrera) who is beautiful and brilliant but, because she has skipped past all the standard character-forming years of human growth, lacks any sense of morality--when she eventually feels threatened, she doesn't hesitate at resorting to homicide.
Hudson gives an earnest performance--he's not just walking through it, as he sometimes did with mediocre material--and Carrera, one of those actresses who seldom got to stretch much because she was typecast as cheesecake, is as good as the film allows.
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.
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..
Although Embryo could have been a potentially thought provoking examination of bioethics, it degenerates into a stereotypical Frankenstein parable, putting across the by now monotonous lesson that there were some realms man was not meant to enter or study.Scientist Rock Hudson is experimenting with ways to prevent miscarried babies from dying.
His experiment works too well, with some decidedly unpleasant side effects.Although Barbara Carrera is reasonably good in her role, and some of the animal training is spectacular, the film suffers from being too fantastical.
It is however my experience that the movies of Ms. Carrera are invariably disappointing because, it seems to me, she's not exactly the star material she appeared to be at the time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A scientist attempts to create the perfect woman using an advanced test-tube procedure he has developed after experimenting on a dog fetus, resulting in a super-intelligent but fast-growing canine.
To this end, he falls in love with his creation - a very beautiful, extremely intelligent woman - who happens to have homicidal tendencies unfortunately also.This sci-fi-horror-melodrama was directed by Ralph Nelson who previously was known to me for a couple of violent westerns, Duel at Diablo (1966) and Soldier Blue (1970), with the latter being a particularly controversial film.
With Embryo, he is involved in something a lot less contentious, yet it does have a look at some uncomfortable issues, such as the horror of a human being growing to full adulthood in a matter of weeks and the associated tragedy inherent in that.
The scientist here is Rock Hudson and I thought he was good enough in the part.
Barbara Carrera stars as his creation, while Diane Ladd plays his dead wife's sister who stays with him to work as his assistant for some reason - it's not really much of a role for Ladd to be fair.
Much better was Roddy McDowall in a cameo appearance in what is certainly the best scene in the movie, he plays a chauvinistic chess master who has his ass whipped by Carrera in front of an amused gathering of guests at a party – McDowall is really entertaining to watch in this part.
Challenging him as best performer is the Doberman who nonchalantly carries out a series if very clever tricks throughout the movie.Overall, while I wouldn't say this is a fully successful film, it's still a pretty interesting one.
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.
Spoilers.Aside from great high profile work like the Exorcist, the 70s threatens to be eclipsed in the history of the horror film.
Films like Embryo and Sisters, which tried to disturb you at a primal level rather than simply shock, deserve their place among the gems of any decade.Those who have seen this film generally relate that Carrera's character in Embryo evolves into a murderous psycho, and they imply that is the crux of the thing.
It's her furious drive to survive that will eventually cost her and several characters everything.Hudson's Dr. Holliston is compared to Dr. Frankenstein in this role, but he's actually a pretty good guy.
When he hits a dog at the beginning of the film, he plays a hunch and takes advantage of the moment to see if he can make the fetus within the dog survive.
The special effects are simple, kept in a secondary, supporting relationship to the story; doesn't it seem silly, when you see a film like this, to think that things have become inverted to the point that it should ever be otherwise?8 Stars.
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.
He removes her fetus and also keeps it alive and, within a few weeks, has a full grown female named Victoria (Barbara Carrera).
But it seems her and the dog acquire some homicidal tendencies and things slowly fall apart...I'm no scientist but I find the science in this questionable.
I recall another Rock Hudson film, that dealt with a thriller/sci-Fi theme ten years earlier, "Seconds"(1966) by John Frankenheimer.
Spoiler alert;Rock Hudson does not end up very well in that one either.This movie was better then I was expecting.
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.
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.
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".
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.
The filmmaker had to resort to devices where the hero is "explaining" things to us in words, so in the film he speaks into a tape recorder.The story is pretty cool though and probably could be good reading with a competent writer.
After his career as a romantic leading man ended in the late 1960s, Rock Hudson starred in lots of different projects, including TV shows and lesser films.
However, I believe that "Embryo" is his only turn as a mad scientist, and that's probably a good thing.
I guess he needed the work.Driving along one dark and stormy night, brilliant Dr. Paul Holliston (Hudson) hits and injures a Doberman, which he brings back to his lab (that looks somewhat like a dank Midwestern basement).
He then manages to raise the dog's unborn puppy outside the womb, so naturally he decides to do the same thing with a human being.
He raises Victoria (the beautiful Barbara Carrera) from a fetus the same way.
The only difference between this and the many 1940s mad scientist movies is that Hudson plays the lead role rather than Boris Karloff.
Hudson sleepwalks through his sordid role, giving the impression that he's truly a washed-up movie star, while Ladd and Carrera are much more believable.
EMBRYO is a low-key science fiction film of 1976, notable for starring a middle-aged Rock Hudson in the protagonist role of a misguided scientist who invents an incredible growth hormone that can transform an embryo into an adult being in the space of a week.
Hudson begins the film by experimenting on his own dog before he manages to create a young woman in his own laboratory, but his experiment has typically unforeseen circumstances.There are obvious parallels to the FRANKENSTEIN story in this film, but otherwise it's very much a low budget production of the 1970s.
With a lot of the current controversy about cloning and embryonic stem cell research, this movie is an interesting flashback to when this concept was first mined for Science Fiction stories.Rock Hudson plays a doctor who hits a dog, and then hits on the concept that the fetuses of the dog could be saved by growing them in a tank using some special drugs.
(There is a great scene where the dog, a DOberman called "Number One", kills a yappy dog and then hides the body.Hudson decides to skip the usual years of animal research and peer review, and apply the process to a human embryo.
Like Frankenstein's monster,Carerra's Victoria proceeds to reek havoc into the life of her creator, killing anyone who stands in her way.Hudson, who was past his prime as an actor, turns in a good performance here.
Roddy McDowell has a cameo as an arrogant chess master who is bested by the novice Victoria.Some of the things in the movie scream "Seventies", like computers as big as a room with tape drives, polyester leisure suits and a character with a huge afro haircut.
The film is frequently out of focus, and the lighting is bad (perhaps so we can't see Hudson's age?) The pacing is slow in many parts (A DVD's fast forward feature is good for getting past these.) This movie is okay, despite its flaws.
And, Dr. Joyce Brothers appears, later, at a party with Roddy McDowall.First, we see Rock Hudson (as Dr. Paul Holliston) light a cigarette and drive recklessly (watch that speedometer!) during a storm; unfortunately, he hits a dog.
What this really boils down to is that Hudson uses an experimental drug to grow the embryo, so that it can survive outside the mother's womb.
The dog, "Number One", grows to adult-size rapidly, and is passed off as its mother.Hudson lives with his sister-in-law Diane Ladd (as Martha Douglas); since his wife Nicole, also a doctor, died in another car accident.
Then, Hudson decides to use his accelerated embryo growth on a human, Barbara Carrera (as Victoria Spencer).Hudson and the cast try their best; but, the "Embryo" storyline is wretchedly absurd nonsense.
If you take away her silly opening and closing scenes, Ms. Carrera's valiant characterization almost works; she might have been a bigger star, if offered better films than this.
Her character is a heartless genius, scared by rapid aging, and turned into a cereal killer.'Algernon' was quite badly written, for a genre novel; and 'Embryo' is very badly written for a dire C movie, and all looks somewhat intentionally bland, the soap opera feel was meant.Hudson plays a creepy, recluse embryologist who has a son, a pregnant daughter-in-law, a jealous sister-in-law, and a research assistant.The movie ends with a car chase, and Rock Hudson's unfunny grimace..
Not bad, but dated film seems more like a tame TV movie than anything else.
Rock Hudson stumbles upon a means of rapidly growing fetuses after he hits a dog with his car.
Taking the experiment one step farther he grows a human fetus which turns into Barbara Carrera who seems to spring to adulthood almost over night.
Scifi horror film is the sort of thing that would have ended up on TV if it wasn't for the star and the nudity.
Its actually not a bad little film but it's the sort of thing that had been done at least a dozen times before.