Test Tube Babies

Test Tube Babies may be as bad as Plan 9, but it is also just as funny. It features a sickeningly wholesome couple whose friends are all drunks, lechers and strippers. Likewise, the scenes in the doctor's office come straight out of the kind of cautionary films they used to show in high school 'health' class, but the party scenes are vintage soft-core porn filler. It's like two different movies crashed into each other, and Test Tube Babies is the wreckage they left behind.

The actors are nearly as good as the barely-animated characters in the Clutch Cargo cartoons, except for the drunk. His humor is intentional, and some of it actually works. And the girl-fight is sensational! Especially the yells the women let out as they roll around on the floor. I'm just trying to figure out where to place this on my list of ten greatest bad movies of all time.

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!

Test Tube Babies is a late 1940s exploitation flick about a boring couple who are unable to conceive. In spite of their wholesomeness they have a wild party at their house with lecherous men, silly drunks, and strippers! The couple seek a doctor's advice on their options for having a child.

This movie is hilarious for its unintended humor. In one scene the couple are in the doctor's office, and after being told that her husband is sterile and cannot father a child for her, the wife misunderstands the doctor and thinks that he is offering to do the deed! The scene with the wild stag party is unforgettable, especially the cat fight featuring two women wrestling around on the floor clawing at each other's clothes. My favorite scene has to be the one where the doctor comes out to speak to the nervous husband and advises him, "Pull yourself together and have a cigarette", then asks the husband to go buy some smokes for him, too! My how times have changed.

One star for the terrible wooden acting, one star for the cat fight and one star for hilarious medical advice = 3 stars from me.

1st watched 2/10/2007 - 2 out of 10(Technical director-Dr. A. Maneck): Silly medical infomercial disguised as a movie. In this movie, we learn about the ins and outs of artificial insemination(which I don't consider to be a Test Tube Baby, as the title is named). We learn about this after a married couple, who are doing OK until the wife wants a baby and all their friends seem to be going that direction, but they can't conceive. After a doctor appointment, we find out the husband is sterile and they decide to try artificial insemination. Along the way, we get to view crazy baby showers attended by the wife where the attendees get drunk with a nude cat fight between a couple of strippers thrown in(not like any baby shower I've attended!!). Why we have to see these scenes, I'm not really sure but they are thrown in and probably didn't make this film viewable at a normal theatre back in 1948. But all In all, the doctor does his thing and the woman has her baby and they live happily ever-after and we wonder at the marvels of modern medicine!(Well, not really, but that's what we're supposed to do, I guess). To be honest, it would have been a less painful experience to read a medical journal instead of having to view this putrid movie.

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