Eve Of Destruction

Dr. Eve Simmons (Renee Soutendijk), dowdy head of a top-secret government research project based in San Francisco, has created the ultimate soldier: a humanoid robot, lifelike enough to pass unnoticed and equipped with a nuclear charge capable of levelling 30 city blocks. Her prize creation, Eve VIII (also played by Soutendijk, made over to look cheap and flashy), is being put through a series of tests to determine whether it can handle such day-to-day activities as going to the bank. Things are going along nicely until Eve VIII gets caught in the middle of a violent bank robbery; its handler is killed and it is shot. Since Eve VIII isn't human, of course, it doesn't die. But the shotgun blast disrupts the internal mechanisms and locks Eve VIII in the ominous sounding "battlefield mode." Eve VIII is simultaneously locked into "slutty shopping mode," and the twin compulsions drive it to pocket the bank robber's MAC-10 and buy a new wardrobe to replace the dreary one which its inventor provided.

Dressed in a skintight black minidress, stiletto heels and red leather jacket, Eve VIII is armed and dangerous in more ways than one. Anti-terrorist Jim McQuade (Gregory Hines) is called in for damage control, and he and Dr. Simmons form an uneasy alliance. Together they hunt down Eve VIII, who appears to be living out Simmons's repressed desires in a particularly bloody way. Simmons is sexually repressed, so Eve VIII picks up a man in a sleazy redneck bar and bites off his penis. Simmons resents her father (Kevin McCarthy), so Eve VIII kills him. And to make matters worse, its nuclear function is accidentally activated while it's ramming a motorist who made the mistake of honking at it on the road: unless deactivated, Eve VIII will explode in 48 hours. Eve VIII travels to New York, where Dr. Simmons's ex-husband and son live; it kidnaps the child and escapes into the subway. McQuade and Simmons follow, and together manage to save the child and deactivate Eve VIII, only moments before it was set to explode.

The contrast between Simmons, a woman who's repressed her human traits, and Eve VIII, the humanoid robot who expresses them, is meant to be the glue that holds the film together, but it simply doesn't work. As played by Renee Soutendijk, the Dutch actress who first came to prominence in countryman Paul Verhoeven's SPETTERS and THE FOURTH MAN and is making her American film debut, Simmons doesn't seem neurotically repressed, just dedicated to her work--surely not a such terrible thing. Eve VIII, who manages astonishing acts of mayhem while teetering on spike heels ("That's a new look for you," Simmons's ex-husband observes when the android turns up on his doorstep, garnering a hearty laugh), may embody the destructive fantasy of woman-as-sex-toy, but there's no depth to the image and her rage at being called a bitch (it all has to do with Simmons's childhood) is genuinely funny--if only it were meant to be so.

Failures of thematic depth aside, if EVE OF DESTRUCTION cranked up the violence and revelled in it, it could make it through on sheer ruthless energy. But it doesn't. The story development is rudimentary and the dialogue painfully conscientious: significant remarks are repeated often enough that no viewer, no matter how inattentive, could miss them. Director and co-writer Duncan Gibbins's background in music video is nowhere in evidence (except perhaps in the title, pointlessly derived from the 60s protest song); unlike most video-spawned directors, Gibbins doesn't seem to value look above all else. Richard Stanley's recent HARDWARE (1990) makes an apt comparison--it too was shallow, but the intricate set design, elaborate visuals and saturated color photography went a long way to hiding the fact. (Violence, profanity, sexual situations.) leave a comment