Test Tube Babies

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!

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.

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 (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.

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.