There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, you find an abandoned film that just got left on your doorstep…
Embryo (1976)
Distributed by: Cine Artists Productions
Directed by: Ralph Nelson
There’s an old saying that victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan.
– President John F. Kennedy, 1961
And boy does that apply here…
The first shot of the film is a computer screen that types out a message from the technical advisor on the movie, who at the time was an associate professor on OB/GYN at UCLA, as a heartbeat pulses on the soundtrack:
The credits proceed over stills of human embryos at different stages of development, before we open on a dark road in the rain. Behind the wheel is Dr. Paul Holliston (Rock Hudson), going over 70 MPH and distracted as he fumbles to light a cigarette.
As he takes a turn, he accidentally hits a Doberman, which Paul picks up and takes home. He’s met there by Martha Douglas (Diane Ladd), the sister of his dead wife Nicole. Exactly why she’s staying with a man who may not still be her brother-in-law is unclear, especially as there’s a certain uneasy tension between them, but there we are. She’s there to help Paul as he takes the dog to his lab where he and Nicole were doing research, and with the additional help of Paul’s son Gordon (John Elerick) and pregnant daughter-in-law Helen (Anne Schedeen) he tries to save dog.
The dog’s not long for this world, but Paul thinks he can save her three pups in her womb by applying some of the research he and Nicole were doing in embryonic development. He places the last surviving pup in a makeshift artificial womb and injects it with placental lactogen, which allows the dog to come to term.
The lactogen so speeds up the dog’s growth, in fact, that he reaches adulthood quickly. Named “Number One” by Paul, the dog shows remarkable awareness and is so well trained, making such a smart boy.
Note that that’s “smart boy,” and not “good boy;” when Paul leaves the dog in the car, he lets himself out to get some air. When he’s confronted by a smaller dog, Number One viciously kills the other canine and hides the evidence before getting back into the car, closing the door behind him.
Paul’s not up to much good either. Paul left Number One in the car as he visits a hospital and asks a favor of its administrator, Jim Winston (Jack Kolvin): He wants the hospital to forward to him cases where a pregnant woman is terminal but is still carrying an embryo that is 12 to 14 weeks old. He proposes trying to replicate the experiment he’d just conducted, only this time using a human subject.
Jim shuts down the conversation and immediately reports Paul to the authorities is worn down by Paul’s insistence and reluctantly agrees to help him procure a subject. And soon enough, a subject comes through, and the new trials begin.
Over the course of four and a half weeks, the fetus grows into an adult whom Paul names Victoria (Barbara Carrera). The woman was given tapes of multiplication tables as she developed, which she soon parrots back to Paul, which to him is a sign of success.
(Insert “teaching to the test” joke here…)
Victoria’s outcome is much like Number One’s, for both good and bad. Like the dog, she is hyper-intelligent and learns very quickly, and she too has no conscience or empathy, which is why she and Number One bond quickly.
Paul can’t see her dark side, as he’s too dazzled by her being a quick study. In very short order, she learns how to speak, can quote a large body of English literature by memory, and is able to best an expert chess master, Frank Riley (Roddy McDowall) at a party Paul escorts her to.
The lessons continue apace when Victoria that night asks Paul to make a woman of her. By now, he’s broken more ethical taboos than Victor von Frankenstein has, so of course he makes love to her. This blinds him totally to what he’s created, an immoral being that’s smarter than everyone around her, including Paul, as she realizes that her aging process is not progressing steadily but taking radical jumps in bursts.
Not wanting to reach old age by next week, she becomes a woman willing to commit any act to save herself, no matter how depraved. She’s a woman with nothing to lose, while Paul may lose everything thanks to her…
And there are so many questions we’re left with as to how this film itself came about. How so many talented people either doing good work at that time or heading for bigger successes down the road got swept up in this is baffling. The fact that the film came and went quickly with no one stopping to write down what was going on as this shoot gestated progressed suggests that anyone tied to it thought it’d be best if everyone forgot this.
It’s easy to see why. The script by Anita Doohan (her first writing credit) and Jack Thomas (his last) is serviceable in terms of moving the story along, even if the story itself doesn’t move all that fast or far. Every actor seemed only semi-interested in being there from what we get on screen, save for McDowell (who only got listed in the credits as a “special guest”). Nelson’s camerawork doesn’t try to present everything shot in a way to make anything we see interesting. And the accompanying score from Gil Mellé feels like it’d be more at home in one of the many made-for-TV films he worked on.
The end result is a work that feels like a made-for-TV film rushed out the door, right before the network’s standards and practices department had a chance to send in their notes. It reeks of discard as you watch it, making the viewer think the company was just throwing it away with no one minding the store.
Which is actually pretty close to describing the film’s fate in later years. The distributor, Cine Artists Productions, looks to have closed down soon after the movie was released, and there’s no record of a renewal of copyright for the film. As a result, this movie is as of this writing in the public domain in the US.
The fact that it’s an orphaned film probably tells you everything you need to know about how successful it was…
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