Instant Favorite.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

This is ultimately a movie about the very bad things that can happen when we don't address our unease, when we just try to brush it off, whether that's to fit in or to preserve our self-image.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Ralph Nelson made some good movies particularly in the 1960s, mostly middle-of-the-road dramas addressing pressing social issues. But he didn't appear to have a fantastical bone in his body, and was clearly the wrong choice to direct this sci-fi variation on the Frankenstein story. 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. He succeeds in saving one such being from a suicidal young woman. 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. But that doesn't happen until the last 15 minutes or so in a movie without any prior "action" (a little partial nudity aside), and Nelson doesn't even seem interested in the violence when it does arrive, keeping it mostly off-screen. 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. The supporting cast is strong enough, excepting Roddy McDowell, who throws off the straightfacedf tone somewhat with an overly hammy "guest star" turn as a snippy chess master infuriated when Carrera's "Victoria" beats him. But the script isn't quite intelligent or credible to be taken seriously. Nor is Nelson's direction stylish, suspenseful, or lurid enough to make "Embryo" any kind of guilty pleasure--it's watchable enough, but once you realize there really won't be much payoff, the entire experience becomes somewhat deflating. While the 70s was full of variable big-studio sci-fi films that in one way or another emphasized their futurism, "Embryo" has no sci-fi trappings at all beyond a premise whose ideas aren't very boldly worked out. It wasn't a success at the time, and one has to admit there isn't much reason to pronounce it under-rated now. It's a competently crafted misfire.

I think this movie was WAY ahead of it's time. Very few people were aware of the scientific manipulations that could be done for development of new life.Also it doesn't hurt that the leading actors are absolutely gorgeous. Barbara Carrera has nude scenes that even a woman can appreciate. 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. I worked with mainframes in 1976, and we were still feeding trays of punch cards into readers to run programs. CRT's were still command line interfaces.There are a bunch of hater's for this movie for resistance to scientists assuming the role of gods.I happen to be a Monsanto HATER, ABHORER, LOATHER, DESPISER! Did ya'll know they "own," legally, but NOT morally IMO, a terminator gene, that renders their seeds unable to reproduce? Imagine if that gene got loose and started mutating flora and fauna. That could be the absolute end of life on our planet. Fortunately, our government, stupid and clueless as it is, has so far denied Monsanto the ability to deploy such a dangerous assault against us.Watch "Bitter Harvest" with Ron Howard to see some of the corporate antics this toxic multinational corporation gets up to: contaminating (getting loose on) neighboring farms with their genetically modified seeds and pollen, then suing them for stealing their patented stuff. They get away with it, and have put many hard-working people out of business and off their land.

I found the movie an interesting update of the Frankenstein story; The monster, an innocent, returns to kill his creators family. How sad. Every action by the players have logical and even good intentions, but they had disastrous results. One wishes that Victoria would have told the doctor of her condition, and both could have worked out a solution. Instead she choose to fight for her survival alone.Although she read the Bible, she had no moral background, Her body was adult (was it ever!) but her experience was child-like at best. Perhaps it was the experimental hormone that created the killer nature; after all, even the dog displayed homicidal tendencies as a result of the his injections.All in all very tragic on a large scale. 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. I thought it well acted, and conceived. The fashions, computers and telephones fix it into it's time zone: Nineteen seventy six. This seems to be an issue with some viewers, not I. Embryo does not need CGI, the effects were adequate. The Dog fetus, being born was well done, as were most of the other effects.

Dr. Paul Holliston (Rock Hudson) is experimenting with fetuses. He manages to remove one from the body of a dying dog and keep it alive AND make it a full grown dog within a few weeks! He gets the body of a dying pregnant woman. He removes her fetus and also keeps it alive and, within a few weeks, has a full grown female named Victoria (Barbara Carrera). Oh yes--she also is a genius. 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 realize it's just a movie but it's introduced with a statement from an (allegedly) actual scientist who says the events in this film could happen. Uh huh. Well...it's been 30 years and I've never heard about this actually taking place. Factual issues aside this is OK. It moves slowly and, really, the plot is kind of silly but it's somewhat interesting. Unfortunately it falls apart completely at the end and gets pretty sick (and stupid). !!!PLOT SPOILERS!!! One of the more interesting scenes include when the dog actually kills another dog. Sounds sick but there's no blood and it's hysterically obvious that the dog being killed is a dummy and not real. Actually the dog here is super intelligent and seeing in preform tricks that a normal dog couldn't do was fun. Also note the now antique technology shown at one point. There is a VERY fun scene where Carrera whips obnoxious Roddy McDowell (chewing the scenery) at a chess game! This may or may not be a selling point to some, but there's a bit of fairly explicit nudity (for a PG film) from Carrera. !!!SPOILER END!!!The acting wavers. Hudson (who could be good) is terrible. He looks miserable and doesn't try to hide his disinterest. Diane Ladd is totally wasted as a helper of his. Carrera is very beautiful and surprisingly good as Victoria. She manages to keep the movie going almost single handedly. So--it's an OK sci-fi movie. Just pretty silly and slow at times. I give it a 6.