Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
Gregory Hines | ... | Colonel Jim McQuade | |
Renée Soutendijk | ... | Dr. Eve Simmons / Eve VIII | |
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Michael Greene | ... | General Curtis |
Kurt Fuller | ... | Bill Schneider | |
John M. Jackson | ... | Peter Arnold | |
Loren Haynes | ... | Steve the Robot | |
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Nelson Mashita | ... | Scientist / Waiter |
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Alan Haufrect | ... | Dr. Heller |
Maryedith Burrell | ... | Dawn Perlin | |
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Norman Merrill | ... | First Scientist |
Craig Hensley | ... | Young Man on Train (as Craig Oldfather) | |
Greg Collins | ... | Skaaren | |
Eddie Matthews | ... | Bank Robber #1 | |
Tom Morga | ... | Bank Robber #2 | |
Tim Russ | ... | Carter |
Eve is a robot, modelled on "her" creator. Eve's armoury includes a nuclear bomb, which for unexplained reasons is on-board during Eve's testing. When things go wrong during the tests, Eve is lost in the big city. Enter the rescue team, which includes the real (human) Eve. They must find and disarm her before she goes "bang". Eve is programmed to protect herself at all costs, so when she runs into a problem, she resorts to her super strength; hence the destruction. Written by Rob Hartill
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...