According to the internet, so it must be true, actress Renée Soutendijk was a star in Europe and the Netherlands in the 1980s. Lithe, athletic, and, most importantly, young and blonde, Soutendijk racked up credit after credit, even playing Eva Braun once. When that mountain is climbed, it’s not uncommon for a star to set their sights on Hollywood. However, whatever dreams of Hollywood stardom or Oscar-winning praise were dancing in her head were shattered by the stark reality of the shitty movie. After this flick, she returned to Europe and never looked back.
Directed by Duncan Gibbins, who had directed many popular music videos, and written by Gibbins and Yale Udoff, Eve of Destruction follows Soutendijk in a dual role. She plays scientist Dr. Eve Simmons, head of a secret government project to develop humanoid robots indistinguishable from the real thing for use in espionage and on the battlefield. Her latest creation is Eve VIII, also played by Soutendijk, a model based on Dr. Simmons herself. It looks like her, talks like her, and has all of Simmons’ memories.
One day during field testing in San Francisco, Eve VIII takes a shotgun blast to the abdomen during a bank robbery and it scrambles her circuits. The damage turns her into a killing machine, and also turns Eve VIII into a surrogate for Dr. Simmons’ repressed urges. Eve VIII, freed from moral restraint, goes on a shopping spree that includes many boxes of bullets, a little black dress and bright red leather jacket, and a Ford Mustang.
The government can’t have a killer robot running loose, so they bring in Colonel Jim McQuade (Gregory Hines), a special forces operative, to hunt her down and kill her. As McQuade points out more than once, he wouldn’t be needed if they had just given Eve VIII an off switch, but then, we wouldn’t have a movie.
Hines was top-billed in this movie, and his affordability was supposedly a reason he got the part. If he seems miscast, that’s because he was. The overall quality and tone of this movie points to the role being more suitable for someone like Wings Hauser, or, if the producers 
were looking for some punch, maybe Dolph Lundgren. But Hines? Perhaps if he had been into it, but Hines’ performance seethes irritability, as if he didn’t want to be there. That could be projection on my part, but after seeing countless movies with actors and actresses slumming it for a paycheck, I feel I can spot when someone regrets signing on the dotted line.
Eve of Destruction is a cat and mouse flick. Eve VIII travels around, does some violent stuff, and McQuade hunts her down. He either arrives after the fact or gets thwarted, rinse and repeat, with the stakes growing with each set piece. Eve VIII even crosses the country in the mistaken belief that Dr. Simmons’ young son is her own, setting up the finale. Oh, and there’s a nuclear bomb in her chest that will vaporize twenty city blocks should it go off. Pro-tip for all you humanoid robotics engineers out there: yes on the off switch, no on the nuclear bomb, especially during a test run. Sure, it’s silly, but this movie could have used more of that.
Eve of Destruction is a movie that was crying out for the filmmakers to let loose. There should have been more explosions, more bloody gore, and a lot more gratuitous nudity. The restraint in this movie may have been an attempt to have it taken seriously, but the end product was bad enough that this ended up going direct-to-video in most countries anyway. It’s like Gibbins and company were in denial of the kind of film they were making. The good news is, it’s not like this kind of story was unique in the early 1990s. There are plenty of other options that fulfill the potential that this film lacked. Eve of Destruction lands in the mediocre middle of the Watchability Index, displacing Day the World Ended at #266.