User Reviews

Thank you, Crow T. Robot for the basis for that tag line.

I went to see this movie on impulse during its (very) short run in the theaters, not hoping for much more than a hidden gem or a quirky little film. It had Gregory Hines in it (who was great in "Running Scared" a few years earlier) and it had a fairly attractive blond playing a Terminator type, so how bad could it be? Well, I found out. When I came out of the theater, I was angry and annoyed; I didn't want my money back, I wanted the two hours of my life I wasted watching it back.

When I saw it was showing again on cable many years later, I sat down to watch the final 20 minutes to see if I still hated it as much. I seemed to have mellowed towards EOD somehow in the intervening decade. On the small screen, it was OK, at least for the last 20 minutes. Not "Star Trek: TNG" OK, or even "Blake's 7" OK, but watchable; say, on a par with one of the products of the endless sausage factory of hackwork films you see on the Sci-Fi Channel, or "Roger Corman Presents" on Showtime Beyond.

I feel badly for the Dutch actress whose career in the States was torpedoed by this mess. She is out of her element here, as is poor Gregory Hines, who I imagine grabbed his paycheck and ran, and hoped no one ever mentioned this movie again. And probably the original screenwriter, who hoped to advance his career with a decent premise, only to see all the life sucked out of his screenplay, went back home for a three week drinking binge .

The problem with this movie, as I see it, is that the director really didn't know what he was doing, and didn't know how to get the performances he needed from his cast. And he didn't seem to understand the requirements of an action movie with futuristic elements. There were many potentially nice moments and lines of dialog which should have bubbled and popped like good champagne. Instead, they just sat there on the screen like stale tonic water - kind of like "Attack Of The Clones", come to think of it. The action and fight scenes were also underwhelming, badly paced and staged, and didn't live up to their potential - what should have been visceral and invigorating just thudded along without ever drawing in the viewer.

Blond Netherlands Actress Lady, I hope you found happiness and fulfillment in some other manner, maybe on the stage or in European cinema. Gregory Hines, rest in peace; we won't think of this movie when we remember you, but instead will remember you as a great hoofer who got to play alongside Baryshnikov and Billy Crystal.

Mediocre sci-fi thriller about a renegade android, Eve VIII(Renée Soutendijk)who malfunctions when she is shot by a bank robber while on a mission. Her creator, Dr. Eve Simmons(also Renée Soutendijk)designed the female android with the same facial characteristics, while also transferring memories, thoughts, and feelings from herself. Those memories reoccur in Eve VIII's mind and she reacts violently. She is very dangerous because, she is a nuclear threat as well. Equipped with a machine gun, this android has to be stopped because she is also very powerful with the ability to toss men across rooms and in the air with ease. The secret government group funding the Eve project enlist the aide of Colonel Jim McQuade(Gregory Hines)with expertise in anti-terrorism, to somehow stop the malfunctioning killer android before truly dire consequences erupt. Many innocent bystanders, and a few profane undesirables, will cross Eve VIII's path and suffer the consequences. The film shows how Dr. Eve must assist McQuade in his efforts to find and kill her creation(a shot through the eyes is the way to down it). The android targets Eve's father(for the murder of her mother which returns in a memory)and later, in the film's harrowing climax in the New York subway, her son.

The film owes a hell of a lot to the really good leads who work well off each other. I've always felt Hines had a strong presence on-screen, very easy to like and charismatic. He takes what could've easily been a dull role and injects life into it. I like his character because he's sympathetic to Eve's cause, yet looks at the dire, difficult situation they find themselves with a levelheadedness. Renée Soutendijk, I thought, was very impressive in this film..having to portray two different characters while making both of them different than the other is an outstanding accomplishment. I give praise for her work in such a rather unextraordinary sci-fi actioner. Pretty much by-the-numbers, but the leads keep it interesting.

Kevin McCarthy has a cameo as Eve's now old-aged father.

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 is a military robot made to look exactly like her creator.

When she is damaged during a bank robbery, the robot begins to use more of the memories she has been programmed with by her creator, the dark, angry ones.

She becomes a killing machine if anyone tries to stop her.

A tap dancer is assigned to stop the robot and with the scientist who programmed her tries to think what she will do next....

This was the original Terminatrix, back in 1991 there were only two cyborgs, Arnie and Eve. Guess who is the least remembered? What I didn't get was just how serious the tone of the film was. Imean the film is basically about a nuclear bomb that gets frustrated when its called a certain word that is derogatory toward women, this should have been hilarious.

When Hines shows up, I thought, this could get the ribs tickled now this guy is in it, but he looks really angry through the film, and ruins the camp feel it should have.

Rene however you pronounce her surname, is really grim in this, at times I couldn't tell who was the cyborg and who was the Doctor, she was that wooden, and it's surprising considering shes so good in Spetters.

But, it's a cyborg movie, a nuclear bomb cyborg movie, and it deliver that typical cheesy nineties action you expect.

Yuppies get owned, hillbillies lose parts of them, and eyes get shot out by Hines, so all is not lost.

Early nineties video stores were rife with his type of film early in the nineties, this one wasn't that bad.

Nearing the end of ICM's poll for the best movies of 1991,I mentioned to family friend Guy Morgan about how much I had enjoyed the Action trash epics Stone Cold and Timebomb(1991-both also reviewed.) Knowing how much I had enjoyed those two, Guy mentioned a third Action flick from the year,which led to me meeting Eve.

View on the film:

Storming in the same year as T2 (1991-also reviewed), the screenplay by co-writer/(with Yale Udoff) director Duncan Gibbins (who died just age 41 in '93 after trying to rescue his cat from a house fire) put the movie in the rather unique position of clearly being inspired by The Terminator (1984-also reviewed), whilst being ahead of the times with a standout chip of the government project giving the cyborgs human memories,and beating Terminator 3, by Eve,being in all but name a female terminator.

Linking the memories of Eve Simmons / Eve terminator, the writers nicely dip into the psychotronic as Eve goes round killing those who hurt Simmons in her repressed memories.

Putting a ticking time bomb in Eve, (her time of the month?) the writers upload exciting set-pieces of hard-nosed cop/Colonel Jim McQuade having to take Eve on in her fight to terminate all who scorned her, and having to drag the memories out of Simmons so Eve's next move can be predicted.

The second of three movies he made, director Gibbins & cinematographer Alan Hume unbuckle wonderfully hectic Action thrills, booming from every punch Eve hands out breaking the victim in half,and sending them back against the wall. Along with the action crunch, Gibbins eyes Eve up with stylish tracking shots following each would-be victim attempting to slyly escape from Eve.

Going in search of Eve with Gregory Hines turn as the cool cat, no nonsense McQuade, alluring Renée Soutendijk gives a wonderful double turn as Simmons / Eve, with Soutendijk presenting Simmons as fragile and on-edge over her memory, neatly counted by the cold eyed killer cyborg in an eve of destruction.

Proto-Species with a robot instead of an alien - only even more cheesy, if that's possible! The dual female role was a mistake... I know they're meant to have the same memories and emotions, but that doesn't mean they need to LOOK the same! It insults the audience to think that they won't get the idea unless there's a red jacket to let them know she's dangerous.

"Nobody will ever put you behind a door!

"RUN TIMMEH, RUN!"

The longer it goes on, the more it loses sight of the line between enjoyably silly, and stupid.

WARNING: Contains plot spoilers.

Eve VIII, an experimental military android, is taken to a downtown bank on test manoeuvres. But the android is damaged after being shot by bank robbers & goes on the loose, trapped in Battlefield Mode. Colonel Jim McQuade, a top-secret anti-terrorist operative & Dr. Eve Simmons, the android's creator, are sent in to deactivate the droid before its built-in nuclear weapon is set off.

Of the numerous synorg (synthetic organism) films that came out in the early 1990s, "Eve of Destruction" is perhaps the dumbest. As an action film, it is moderately exciting, with some good action set-pieces, most notably the scene where hero Gregory Hines tries to kill the synorg & rescue a child while a train is approaching them.

But action scenes aside, the film's main problem is the script. You can ignore the idea of taking a military synorg into a downtown bank for a test run, but the android's design is extremely stupid – why build a robot with a built-in nuclear weapon that can be activated by something like a heavy impact, but without any security overrides or any off-switch (Hines brings this up in the film several times)? It just doesn't make any sense.

As the synorg's creator, Renee Soutendijk is not bad in what is her first American film, but as the synorg, she is completely unconvincing – the scenes where she picks up guys in a bar before biting their genitals off, as well as ramming drivers off the road are so bad it's not funny. Gregory Hines is given lines that make him look bad.

Note to aspiring mad scientists: if you're planning to build a synorg with a nuclear device, make sure you add in a safety feature to prevent anything going wrong, instead of having to shoot the droid in the eyes to deactivate it.

I wish I could just leave the review title, but no, I have to fill in 500 characters. And then some.

Gregory Hines should have ran or at least tap danced his way from this movie. Too many things wrong.

This Dutch main character was in real life, far too young in to have so many letters in front and behind her name, more than the general has ribbons as said by Gregory Hinds about her titles and PhDs, yet she tried to play a much older woman with a hot body. Apparently, in the 80s, she was supposed to be a Dutch sex symbol. Hardly. In her youth she was a gymnast. Here, she just looked like a cheap 70s porn star, and acted much like one, cheap and fake.

The fact that ye olde U. S. government wouldn't have put a nuclear device loose in a test weapon makes this movie stalled from the pits. That it was being tested on human soil in civilian settings with said weapon is even more stupidly plotted.

Then there was only one Caucasion fenale model. At first, there was a Caucasian male model who was canceled. This makes no sense in a real world situation. Sure, you can speculate their could have been more models, but there couldn't have been because the model made was a clone of the woman who was in charge of her creation and also had her memories, flawed memories at that, which also wouldn't fly in any weapon in any nation's arsenal.

I guess we're supposed to also believe that when an android gets damaged, it's supposed to take memories into context, but it didn't. It got hormonal. Also, why would the clone cyborg have memories to steal an uzi, go steal a red mustang, obtain only 250 9mm rounds, go to a sleazy motel/bar, get in a sexual situation with a rural cowboy/lumberjack/truck driver, and then remove his privates with her mouth? Or would the clone intentionally try to kill random people? These were mostly hormonal actions. The rest would be actions done by the clone of a female street walker. None of these would have been in the memory of the Dutch doctor the memories came from. Just an all around mess.

Let's get to the rest of the mess. Cops facing a known armed and dangerous fugitive, the flight to New York, the mustang beamer wreck, Gregory Hines supposing to be a sharpshooter, but shows up with probably one of the worst firearm setups possible, the inability for anyone to be able to shoot this android, cyborg, whatever you want to call her, through the eye, it's unfathomable.

One of the biggest bloopers in the movie was the air bag deployment in the BMW. While the 1987 Mustang used in the movie didn't have air bags (that was only standard equipment from 1990 on), people in the bloopers state so many things about the BMW air bag being deployed from the color to deploying from a rear end collision. There surely wouldn't have been an air bag deployment, not because of the collision point, but because, just like the Mustang, BMW 325i didn't have airbags until 1990. This was a 1984 BMW 325i in the scene. Air bags have been around since the 1920s, but the first one in real use was in a 1973 Oldsmobile. They weren't standard equipment in pretty much any vehicle until the 1990s. So, for the producers of the movie to use this as a minor plot device to show how psycho and hormonal a cyborg was, is totally unbelievable. This mindset persists on throughout the movie. Let's make things up that are totally unnecessary to the plot and purely garbage for the movie to plod on.

Then, you have poor old Gregory Hines in a roll that no one could play. While he has played cops and military personnel or arms dealers in the past, he never did it well. For him to play the best choice the U. S. had to take on the world's most top secret weapon is the biggest laugh of this movie. Let's ask Gomer Pile to take on Vladimir Putin. That would have been more realistic.

Then the only person who can kill the cyborg is the creator herself by shoving the blunt barrel of Hine's horrible weapon choice into the cyborgs supposedly armored forehead. Come on. This is Nickelodeon cartoon writing.

The creators of the Terminator films were probably laughing at this sad attempt of a copycat. Who knows? It bombed so bad, it probably flew below their radars.

Best thing is to avoid this poorly written, badly cast, and horribly directed hodgepodge.

The movie was a box office disaster when originally released, but found a second life on VHS and DVD. It's been largely ignored over the years, partly because it's rarely shown on television.

Eve VIII (Renee Soutendijk) is a deadly android created in the image of her maker. After years of research, the machine is sent out on her first test mission. Things go horribly wrong when she's damaged and short- circuits. Now, Eve VIII is maiming and killing anything it perceives as a threat. Terrorism expert Jim McQuade (Gregory Hines) and the android's creator must track it down before she goes nuclear.

I remember seeing this little slice of cheese in theaters when it first came out and often wondered what happened to it. It's not a great movie by any means. However, if you're looking for some additional cyborg fun after exhausting your copies of all the "Terminator" movies, look no further. The best way to describe this is as the "Terminator" if Arnold Schwarzenegger was replaced by a middle-aged blonde in a mini-skirt and high-heels.

The late Gregory Hines does a wonderful job playing the no-nonsense terrorist expert assigned to track down Eve VIII. He marches around convincingly with his oversized pistol wondering why they didn't give the android an "f@3!ing off switch." Renee Soutendijk portrays both the doctor and the Eve VIII robot, switching back and forth from panic- stricken to emotionless, seductive, and angry. The movie really gave the actor a wide range of emotions to bounce through in her first American role.

The movie is rated R for strong violence, language, adult situations, and nudity. it really feels like the boob shots in "Eve of Destruction" are needless and tacked on to tantalize male audiences. They don't help to further the story or plot, except to show that Eve VIII looks real in every way. I still don't think they were necessary to get the point across.

"Eve of Destruction" is a perfect example of the sci-fi movies audiences were getting in the early and mid-1990s. It fits nicely next to such cult classics as "Mandroid," "Nemesis," "Hardware," and "Universal Soldier." Is it as entertaining as "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" or "Total Recall?" Of course not, but it still has its place in the Museum of Schlocky Genre Cheese.

Why would a surveillance/reconnaissance robot be nuclear armed?

And why this outfit? It is supposedly programmed with the thoughts and feelings of its creator, who always dresses appropriately.

And where did it hide the atomic bomb? With the outfit it wears, I don't think it could conceal a Kotex.

The govt assassin is shot repeatedly by an Uzi and run over by a train, and is hardly even winded--perhaps it's his Survival School training.

The robot is completely impervious to bullets, yet loses an arm by accident and shows bullet wounds on its face.

I did not think Renee was very beautiful looking, but her English was amazingly good; I didn't realize she was a foreigner until I reviewed the cast on IMDB; that's the only reason I rated it so high as a 4.