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Audio Format: Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround Video Format: Widescreen 1.85:1 (Anamorphic) Languages: Japanese Subtitles: Korean, English, Japanese Region Code: ALL Year Made: 1999 Running Time: 83
Set in 1910 during the Meiji Restoration and based on the Edogawa Rampo short story The Twins written around the same time, Gemini features Masahiro Motoki (a former boy-band member, also seen in Takashi Miike's 1998 film The Bird People of China / Chugoku No Chojin) as Dr Yukio Daitokuji. The Doctor runs a clinic near the slums of Tokyo where a plague is currently running rife, though places a higher precedence on treating war victims or the wealthier citizens of the area than his mangy neighbours. Not long after strange smells begin exuding from his comfortable abode, his mother and father shuffle off their respective mortal coils and the righteous physician comes face to face with his doppelg?ger Sutekichi.
Cast aside at birth due to a prominent snake-like scar and raised by the neighbouring shanty dwellers, Yukio's lost twin is understandably irked by his rather unfair share of the birthrights and promptly shoves his brother down the dried-up well at the bottom of the garden. The interloper then shacks up with the doctor's waif-like wife Rin (Ryo) and overzealously pitches himself into his conjugal duties whilst his brother languishes in the pit.
 
  
The cult success of the post-industrial cyberpunk movie Tetsuo - The Iron Man (1989), its proceeding short, Adventures of Electric Rod Boy (Denchu Kozo No Boken, 1988), and the higher budgeted sequel Tetsuo II - Body Hammer (1991) have meant that these and director Tsukamoto's subsequent films Tokyo Fist (1995) and Bullet Ballet (1998) have earnt him a justifiably high degree of esteem outside of Japan. As such, I had high hopes for his latest, but though I hate to say it Tsukamoto's departure into modernist costume horror is somewhat of a disappointment.
Undoubtedly a talented cinematic stylist, Tsukamoto's overblown approach seems totally at odds with the requirements of the script, and what should have come across as a macabre gothic tale more resembles the monstrous offspring of a marriage between Peter Greenaway and a late 80s pop video. A great deal of effort has been poured into the costumes and make-up, delineating the soberly restrained environs of the wealthy middle-class doctor with that of the earthy carnival atmosphere of the neighbouring slums where brother Sutekichi was raised, and exaggerating the horrific elements of Rampo's story to a degree that can almost be described as camp, but it all looks rather too off-pat to prove effective. Whereas the plasticity of his visuals may look good in a technological urban setting, scenes such as the appearance of the demon twin in the guise of a cartwheeling wolfman merely look silly.
  
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