The Dutch actress Renée Soutendijk (who made her name ten years earlier as 'The Girl with the Red Hair') is magnificent in her only American film as Dr. Eve Simmons and her robot double Eve VIII in this fascinating cross between 'The Colossus of New York' and 'Marnie'. It sounded like fun when it briefly hit cinemas 25 years ago; and after waiting a quarter of a century for it to turn up on TV or on the DVD rack, YouTube once again has finally come to the rescue...An exercise in which robot Eve is allowed out in San Francisco dressed (like Dr.Simmons herself) like Hillary Clinton inevitably goes wrong; and after being accidentally reprogrammed in Battlefield Mode she's transformed into a seriously hot Ms Hyde who rather than heading for an army surplus store and purchasing a set of combat fatigues instead opts for the hooker look: spending the rest of the film in blood red lipstick, a black mini skirt, high heels and red leather bomber jacket that she accessorizes with a red Mustang (which she later swaps for a red jeep). Thus equipped, she starts making life hard for sleazeballs on the pull, a yuppie roadhog and her abusive father (played in a brief cameo by an unbilled Kevin McCarthy). Then her maternal instinct kicks in...Obviously the people who designed Eve VIII never go to the movies, otherwise they would never have been careless enough to make their latest secret weapon a foxy blonde who can already kill a man with her bare hands even when not carrying an Uzi. She also happens to be a tactical nuclear weapon with a 24 hour trigger (I'm sure we've all met women like that; and the mind boggles at what the Taliban would have made of her had she ever been deployed against them). But scariest of all she's also carrying a lot of emotional baggage inherited from Dr. Simmons, whose memories and fantasies have been programmed into her; and reacts to the word 'bitch' the way Marnie Edgar used to react to thunderstorms and the colour red. The film's writers plainly felt this made the movie 'deeper'; but personally I would have been happier with her just sticking to being an unstoppable killing machine...

Eve of Destruction is a silly, all too predictable Terminator rip off with far too many plot holes to work. It suffers from a weak lead performance from Gregory Hines and incredibly weak writing. It follows a government counterinsurgency agent who is tasked with tracking down an android that went berserk on its test run.One of the film's main problems is that it is rife with plot-induced stupidity. For starters, the military sends a combat ready android for a test run in a city full of civilians, complete with a battlefield nuclear weapon that can apparently be triggered if the robot gets jostled. Furthermore, Eve's creator fails to tell Hines that she programmed the android with memories of her father killing her mother, even when it becomes clear that Eve is acting on the personal information programmed into her memory.Furthermore, Gregory Hines is not the right person for his role. His character requires toughness, while Hines simply comes across as sarcastic. This role was meant for Bruce Willis, not a tap dancer. Renee Soutendjik does better with her role, but isn't given much to do with it. She's basically playing a female Ah-nuld with a Dutch rather than Austrian accent.Finally, the film telegraphs most of its plot twists in advance. When we see the female lead's son early in the film, we just know he's going to get caught up in the climax.

Eve of Destruction is infamous in The Netherlands because it meant the failure of Renée Soutendijk's career in the States, the film being a flop. When I was watching this movie however, I didn't expect such a B-movie. Surely the story was not original, but the special effects were really pathetic and everything looked just plain and ugly. What bothered me most was the unfitting, melodramatic music score which sounded like it was made for an eighties soap-opera (!). I think a low budget is not really an excuse here because the superior Terminator (1984! 7 years older) was also made with a low budget. But that one had genius James Cameron directing and Arnie on the rise of stardom, besides good performances by the other actors. Expect none of that here. The casting, the soundtrack, the dialogue, the action and the effects: they all disappoint. One of those movies that you really regret wasting your precious time on. Not 1/10 though because there are even worse Terminator clones.I give it 2/10.

Of all the thousands of movies I've seen that have employed guns and tanks and exploding things, this is the first that made me want to turn the gun on myself. As each scene wore on and on, I kept gesturing in the air to 'hurry it up'. It was as if dead people were on the screen. The characters spoke so slow, I began to doubt that any of them ever spoke before! A world of frustration. There was only a little tension, a fair plot and a whole lot of inconceivabilities. Supposedly, the robot was infused with the memories and life experiences of her/its creator. So, it was expected to act and respond according to this 'information'. Yeah, right. Yawn. Gregory Hines was right for the role and his performance was very good, as expected. Everybody else were rank amateurs, as evidenced by their uninteresting, wooden deadpan styles. Avoid this movie unless you want to eat your own lead salad.