It’s usually a bad sign when a movie’s name gets changed at the last minute. And so it is indeed with Evil Woman, which was called Saving Silvermann until someone decided to replace a reasonable, if bland, title with a hackneyed old phrase that makes it sound totally uninteresting.
Actually, on second thought, maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea, because Evil Woman is, in fact, totally uninteresting. Some teenage lads with a fondness for bad behaviour and a fear of strong women may find it amusing, but otherwise it is pretty much a dead loss. To be fair, FHM magazine did give it a lot of stars — but then it is a publication that uses the word “spading” to mean picking up chicks, and cutely uses the term “hair pie” in the mistaken belief that it is less offensive than simply saying “cunt”.
Evil Woman is about three chums, Wayne (Steve Zahn), JD (Jack Black) and Darren (Jason Biggs), who meet at school and stay friends as life progresses from embarrassing encounters with schoolgirls to embarrassing encounters with adult women. They are Neil Diamond fanatics and play in a Neil Diamond tribute band. They are a loathsome threesome, whom it would be kind to label “laddish”; they are too pathetic, though, to merit even that ambiguous epithet. At least they have each other.
That all goes wrong, however, when Darren falls for the evil woman of the title, Judith Fessbeggler (Amanda Peet). She immediately sets about remaking Darren to her own requirements, attempting to cut him off from his two buddies into the bargain. This seems reasonable enough, given that he is so lacking in either attractive personality traits or socially useful attributes, let alone any sense of style, and his friends are not the kind that should engender any loyalty. They don’t see things that way, of course; they take offence at Judith’s domineering ways and decide that the best thing to do is to kidnap her while trying to set Darren up with a girl he was in love with at school.
What transpires from this situation is not very gripping and only very rarely funny. As Evil Woman staggers from one predicatable scenario to the next, the viewer is left to wonder about its portrayal of women, who seem to be either hardcore bitches like Judith or poodle-haired little things like Darren’s girlfriend from school, who is, appropriately enough, a trainee nun. (“In a week I’m going to take my final vows,” she says breathlessly.) When she appears in her novice’s outfit, though, it is little more than a miniskirt with matching wimple.
Judith, certainly, seems to represent the worst fears of the kind of male presented by the movie (together, they make a package that can only make heterosexuality seem extremely unappealing). Judith is in charge; she knows what she wants. Okay, she’s inconsiderate as well — once sexually satisfied, she ignores poor Darren’s needs. But then that just makes her like a lot of men, and I thought being a man of the least “pussy-whipped” kind was a good thing in this movie’s moral scheme. At the most thoughtful level of the film’s attempt at characterisation, she is revealed to be a psychologist by training — meaning she has extra skills when it comes to manipulating these poor, uncomplicated, good-hearted guys. For me, though, the movie’s demonising of her as the ultimate vagina dentata fails utterly, and I was entirely on her side throughout the film, hoping against hope that she’d get another chance to knee one of them in the knackers.
The movie has two or three funny moments: an electrocution, something about “buttcheek implants”, and I can’t remember the other one. Otherwise, it is mirth free. I didn’t think I’d ever see a movie in which the highlight was an appearance by Neil Diamond as his own wooden self, but this is it.