In the back alley of 1970s cinema, Embryo lingers like a forgotten science fair project gone rogue. It’s a movie about playing God, loving your science experiment, and then regretting both in quick succession. Directed by Ralph Nelson—who once had the audacity to make Charly—Embryo is a curious blend of bioethics, soft horror, and ’70s sexual anxiety, all dressed up in polyester lab coats and strung together with the seriousness of a PSA warning you not to sleep with your clones.
The Petri Dish Origins
Embryo hatched from the overcaffeinated mind of Ralph Nelson, a director who once asked, “What if we gave a mentally challenged man super intelligence?” and then apparently thought, “Now let’s do that, but sexy and homicidal.” The film arrived in 1976, right on the cusp of America’s great cinematic identity crisis: post-Watergate, pre-Star Wars, when science fiction was still mulling over whether it wanted to be smart, spooky, or exploitative. The film was a spiritual sequel to Charly in the same way that your second divorce is a sequel to your first: technically, yes—but narratively, a lot messier.
Sandy Howard produced it, which tells you most of what you need to know: this was the same man who would soon produce The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977), in which Barbara Carrera also appears—because once you’ve played an artificially-aged, fetus-murdering, methotrexate-huffing sexbot, your résumé can only go up. Add to this the uncanny fact that some of the same makeup team did both films, and one wonders if they kept a leftover prosthetic fetus or two in cold storage.
Rock Hudson and the Rise of Victoria the Vixen
Speaking of awkward résumés, enter Rock Hudson—back on the big screen after three years, presumably because even he couldn’t resist the pitch: “You run over a dog, save its unborn puppy with a magic serum, then use the same trick to grow a suicidal woman’s fetus into a full-grown woman who becomes your lover and also possibly your murderer. Thoughts?” Rock, bless him, gives it the ol’ square-jawed try, though by the third act, even he looks like he’s calculating how far he can fast-walk out of frame before the credits roll.
Barbara Carrera, in her first of four genre films, is stunning and spooky in equal measure as Victoria—a genetically fast-forwarded science project with the IQ of a NASA mainframe and the ethics of a shark. She plays chess like Bobby Fischer, seduces like Mata Hari, and ages like an unrefrigerated banana. The film lets her do it all—except be credible for a moment longer than necessary. Diane Ladd, meanwhile, plays a jealous sister-in-law with the suspicious curiosity of a soap opera detective, ultimately poisoned with the very serum she was skeptical of. Chekhov’s methotrexate, if you will.
From Cult Lab to Bargain Bin
Upon release, Embryo got about as much fanfare as a lukewarm cup of Tang. It was rebranded later as Created to Kill—which is like renaming The Sound of Music as Singing Nun: The Hills Strike Back—and somehow fell into public domain limbo. That’s why you can now find it on every dusty DVD rack in a gas station near you, right between Plan 9 from Outer Space and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. The quality varies from “taped off TV in 1984” to “filmed by a potato.”
Roddy McDowall appears just long enough to be humiliated in chess, while Dr. Joyce Brothers makes her acting debut as herself—though why she showed up, or how she escaped the shoot with her dignity, remains a medical mystery. As for Ralph Nelson, this was his final film. And while he went out with more of a confused sigh than a bang, you have to respect a man who said, “Let’s Frankenstein this fetus and see what happens.”
Final Diagnosis
Embryo is not good, but it is interesting. It’s a film made at a time when you could still say, with a straight face, “Yes, let’s cast Rock Hudson as a horny geneticist and make the climax involve a fetus heist.” The pacing drags like a bad leg, the moral implications are queasy at best, and the science is a Lovecraftian fever dream—but the sheer nerve of it all gives Embryo an accidental charm. Like a B-movie that overdosed on graduate-level ethics, it leaves you pondering one final thought: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
⭐️⭐️⭐️ (3/5)
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