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.

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.

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.

Test Tube Babies (1948)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Silly "teach the American people" style film that's in the same league as other docudramas like Reefer Madness and The Cocaine Fiends. George and Cathy fall in love, get married and after a few years they decide to have a kid but it turns out George is sterile. After a few tears the couple decides to try "test tube babies". Again, this is a silly little exploitation film about artificial insemination that tries to teach people that it's not a bad thing to do. Unfortuantly there isn't too much camp value here as things are bad but they never get bad enough to laugh at. Timothy Farrell co-stars.

TEST TUBE BABIES is a low-rent B-movie designed as an educational film to educate the couples about the new-fangled process of artificial insemination. Clocking in at barely an hour long, this is on the outset similar to one of those 'public information' films that were so popular in the middle of the 20th century, but at heart it's an exploitation picture.

Otherwise, how can you explain the film's attempts to titillate? A scene where a woman strips down in a doctor's office ready for her gynaecological examination is gratuitous enough, but things really get out of hand with a random cat-fight thrown into the mix where one woman is stripped topless. The nudity is brief indeed, but it still must have been strong stuff for the 1940s.

As is the usual with these productions, the acting is extraordinarily wooden and stilted, the dialogue unintentionally hilarious (and scenes of the doctor smoking in his office are definitely a product of their era) and the message extremely heavy-handed. It makes for an amusing viewing experience for the modern viewer, that's for sure.