Test Tube Babies

George and Cathy are a typical, young married couple. George is tired of their current social scene. The drinking parties are getting out of hand, and work is consuming the rest of George's time.

One of the parties really "heats up" when a woman does a "striptease". Bizarrely, the only one ending up topless is some bald guy! Not-too surprisingly, a "catfight" ensues.

Unfortunately for him, Cathy is bored and enjoys the male companionship she gets from their friend, Frank.

George becomes extremely jealous, and decides that the answer is to immediately start producing children. Alas, the couple finds out that they can't produce any offspring.

Fear not! Modern science can help!

TEST TUBE BABIES is another absurd film that hides its -for the era- prurient subject matter behind a veneer of being an "educational" film. It's also pretty dull, having little in the way of intentional or unintentional laughs. So, this is no REEFER MADNESS, although George and Cathy's visit to their monotone doctor is almost humorous...

Are the producers championing a noble cause to create public awareness for artificial insemination, or are they simply abusing the medical angle to display non-relevant T&A? The answer is "B". Test Tube Babies is about a young couple who can't have kids and explore scientific methods for fertilization. Rather dull in the first and last thirds of the film, but the Swingers Party is awesome, providing tips for even the jaded MTV generation. And for those in the process of preparing an otherwise dull medical presentation, this film will demonstrate how the addition of gratuitous nudity, strip-teases, and cat-fighting will keep your audience tuned-in. A young Timothy Farrell (pre-Umberto Scalli) appears as the doctor.

This very entertaining melodrama is one of those old exploitation flicks that pretended that it was a message movie to get itself passed the censor. Any film that addressed issues of sex in the 1940's was deemed very racy. This movie is basically an excuse to show scenes of very brief nudity, women cat-fighting and a drunken swinger's party; it tags on material that promotes the then new science of artificial insemination. What makes it so enjoyable is the combination of the appalling acting, the over-ripe melodrama and the completely unsubtle message combined with ludicrous wicked behaviour.

The film features the legendary non-actor Timothy Farrell as the chain-smoking doctor who at one point asks the husband of the woman in labour if he could pop out and buy him some cigarettes! At another time he is part of a quite uproariously funny misunderstanding between doctor and patient, when after informing the unlucky couple that they cannot have children because the husband is sterile, he tells them there is something he can do, to which hilariously, and completely without irony, the wife seems to think that he means he is willing to bang her! So very, very funny. The wife is played by an actress called Dorothy Duke, and unsurprisingly I have never seen her in any other production, as her acting is quite exceptionally atrocious. However, I enjoyed her earnest performance enormously. But in fairness, every actor and actress in this movie cannot act.

I have to admit that I lapped up this old exploitation flick very much indeed. The melodrama is so ridiculous and the swinger's party is very funny – wait for the cat-fight. And it's rounded off with the ludicrous scenes in the clinic. By all conventional standards I guess this is a bad film but by entertainment standards this is a very enjoyable one. I certainly recommend it. Oh and the title is utterly meaningless.

Oh man what a terrible film! But it can be funny as all get outs! This is the type of film they passed as education on adult topics like this one about being sterile and artificial insemination. I found the part with the doctor being blunt with the man really funny... especially after he was being blunt then told the man (husband) "let me be blunt... dead" -- I fell out laughing!! He was already about as blunt as he could get by actually saying the word "sperm" and then suddenly wanted to be blunt about the sperm being "dead". That was too funny!! If you haven't seen this film, then you'd have to see it to understand why it was so funny... and if you have seen the film then you know what I mean already!! Haha! OH It took about 30 minutes before the husband to find out the he was sterile... before that it was all about a swingers party and it even had a stripper insulting the "nice ladies". One of the "nice ladies" and the stripper ended up in a cat-fight and get got a chance to see a the top nude half of the blonde stripper - just for a few seconds! LOL.

Really the film was NOT very educational about sterility and artificial insemination - it was an exploitation film of some kind and you really can't tell what - maybe just swinging adults?!! OH and the camera man wanted a peek at a couple of women's breasts so they made sure we, the viewers, got a quick glimpse of them too. ONE MORE THING: This movie really has zero to do with test tube babies, really it doesn't.

It's a 1/10 film -- but I got some giggles out of this one so it gets an extra point for making me laugh!!

2/10

TEST TUBE BABIES is a sleazy and horrid little film that is actually much worse than Ed Wood's "masterpiece", PLAN 9! In every conceivable way (like the pun?), it's worse--the acting, the writing, the directing, the sets and the stripping (yes, I did say "stripping").

This film purports to be an educational film that is for adults who want to learn about the new miracle of artificial insemination (not, actually, "test tube babies" as the title would seem to indicate). However, apart from a very boring and poorly written last 1/3 of the movie (punctuated with a gratuitous nude scene), there is nothing educational about this mess. In fact, it's a soft-core porn movie by today's standards and an X-rated film for 1948! There is nothing educational about showing the young bride parading around the house in a see-through nightgown, a "wild" party where one of the females strips for her friends (where she and the female "friends" look like they really were either strippers or prostitutes), and when the young wife takes off her clothes in the doctor's office and you get a quick glimpse of her totally naked body! For 1948, this is VERY hot stuff, though audiences today might find it all pretty tame and it would have received an R rating.

But what hasn't changed over the years is the pathetic nature of the film from a technical standpoint--in 1948 as in now, it's a terrible film. The acting is very amateurish most of the time--with a blonde at the party and the young wife often speaking as if they're dyslexic and reading from cue cards, the husband mispronouncing the word "gynacologist", a doctor with the charisma of a tomato and the use of strippers/prostitutes for the female roles. And, when mistakes were made, they simply stayed in the film because the filmmakers seemed unwilling to edit anything! If PLAN 9 deserved to receive a score of 1 from so many viewers, shouldn't it be possible to give TEST TUBE BABIES some score even lower?!

My wife watched this film with me and is now angry that she lost an hour of her life that she can never get back. I guess I owe her some flowers or a back rub!