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All Rise...

Your Gemini is no match for Appellate Judge Tom Becker's Aries.

The Charge

I am you…when I love, you love. You are me…when I kill,
you kill.

The Case

Those decadent, amoral, '60's era Brits. So kinky, so flip, yet so brittle
and confused, they engage in all manner of perversion, though they seldom seem
to have any fun. Darling's experiences were
certainly embittering, and Georgy Girl found fulfillment by compromising
her way into the upper middle class.

In Goodbye Gemini, we meet good-looking but bizarre blond twins Jacki
(Judy Geeson, Ten Rillington Place) and Julian (Martin Potter, Fellini Satyricon). Weirdly
childlike, though they're in their 20s, they arrive at the family estate in
London and proceed to off the elderly, authoritarian caretaker. Then it's off to
the local pub, where they meet the slightly sinister Clive (Alexis Kanner,
Connecting Rooms) and his friend Denise (Marion Diamond). Soon, Jacki and
Julian find themselves mingling with an eclectic—and sometimes
dangerous—group of hedonistic swingers, with the charming, duplicitous
Clive becoming increasingly more manipulative.

But are these angelic-looking hipsters as innocent as they look?

Goodbye Gemini is a modest entry in the UK kink-and-horror canon of
the '60s and '70s. Not as high-minded or substantive as The Servant or as subversively silly and
lurid as something like the Peter Cushing-starrer Corruption, Goodbye Gemini is a
tamely titillating quirk piece on par with Brit efforts such as Twisted
Nerve, W, and the Albert Finney remake of Night Must Fall. It
spends much of its running time offering up elements that must have seemed
daring then—lots of free love, hints of incest, and gay guys and
transvestites galore—without ever creating a particularly compelling
story. It's twisty enough, but meatless.

The first half of the film promises more than we end up getting, with the
shallow, emotionally stunted twins playing childish games with each other and
later with Clive. There's a strong and creepy sexual undercurrent, and feeling
that Jacki and Julian are keeping some kind of intriguing secret. We've already
seen them kill, and Jacki carries a Teddy bear named Agamemnon, whom they treat
more as a totem than a stuffed toy. Clive has an element of danger about him,
and we soon find that he is, in fact, in danger, and that he plans to use the
twins—unwittingly—to help get him out of his jam.

Here's where the film should start to come together, where all the weirdness
we'd seen earlier should pay off; unfortunately, the opposite happens. Clive's
attempt to outsmart the twins involves a Polaroid camera and compromising photos
with some not-very-convincing transvestites. Once they figure out what's going
on, the twins concoct their own scheme, which gets out of hand, and soon,
everything is spiraling this way and that. Along for the ride: Sir Michael
Redgrave as a respectable gentleman who takes an interest in Jacki.

Director Alan Gibson's film looks more interesting than it is, effectively
"mod," and with an emphasis on ambiguity—lots of mirror images
and people who are not what they appear, and the staid Redgrave as a reasonable
counterbalance to the hedonistic young. If only the story had kept pace, this
would have been a great, kinky relic; as it stands, it's fun and mildly sordid,
but ends up rather ordinary. Geeson is effectively odd as Jacki, and Potter
plays the tightly wound Julian well, but Kanner is just great as the duplicitous
yet seductive Clive.

The disc is a decent affair: reasonable transfer, though not without its
share of nicks and some softness; audio is acceptable, though subtitles would
have helped a lot (particularly with all the British accents). Extras include
the film's trailer, a trailer gallery with spots for Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny
& Girly, The Last Grenade, Say Hello to Yesterday, and Doctor Death: Seeker of Souls, and a
commentary track with Geeson and Peter Snell, who produced Goodbye
Gemini.

The Verdict

If quirky British psychodoodling is your thing, then you'll probably want to
give Goodbye Gemini at least a rental. Not for all tastes, but not
guilty, either.