One quip about an electric car being sarcastically referred to as "gay" in the new Ron Howard comedy The Dilemma is causing a major flap in the film industry. The gay rights group GLAAD persuaded Universal to cut the line from its trailer for the movie, saying it reflects negatively on a minority. However, Ron Howard has refused to go a step further and remove the line from the actual film. Howard is an unlikely target for such criticisms, as his liberal leanings are well-known. He says in no way endorses gay-bashing but draws the line at bending to censorship from activist groups, saying that doing so would lead to a slippery slope with major implications for filmmakers. GLAAD says it isn't being thin-skinned, but is trying to make audiences more sensitive to gay rights in the wake of several high profile crimes against homosexuals. Is Howard being insensitive or is GLAAD making a mountain out of a molehill? Judge for yourself by clicking here to read the full story.

Reader Eddie Love advises us that Blake Edwards' Gunn, a big screen adaptation of the TV series Peter Gunn starring Craig Stevens, is now available on Netflix as a digital download - albeit as a "pan-and-scan" print with French titles! Better than nothing, but we wonder if this title will ever get a "proper" DVD or digital download release.

By Adrian Smith

Odeon Entertainment are continuing their quest to bring a mixture of sought after and totally obscure titles to DVD with generous extras here in the UK.

Goodbye Gemini (1970) stars Martin Potter and Judy Geeson as twins in a complicated and suspiciously incestuous relationship. They are 20 years old but they roam and play in their large Chelsea townhouse like children, and what begins as childish pranks escalate into something seriously disturbed. At that time Potter was fresh from his success in Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) whilst Geeson had made a big impression as a promiscuous schoolgirl in To Sir With Love (1967), and in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1968), espousing free love whilst skinny-dipping in a lake. Goodbye Gemini was directed by Alan Gibson shortly before he made two Dracula films for Hammer. With his name attached, along with a supporting cast including former Frankenstein’s monster Freddie Jones one might expect the film to be a horror, but it’s not as easy to pigeonhole as that. The film could more accurately be described as a psychological thriller, set in the tail-end of the 1960s where post-Altamont and Charles Manson, the hippy dream has well and truly gone sour. It’s a fascinating and terrifying film that crosses sexual boundaries and pushes relationships over the edge. When we spoke to Martin Potter he remembered the film well: “As an actor I was trained to tell truth. In Goodbye Gemini there was this awful scene where I was about to gas myself, having done something truly awful. There was Hammer horror, where as an audience you didn’t expect Christopher Lee or anyone else to explain what they were doing. It was just a genre of film. But I do recall with Goodbye Gemini trying, probably incredibly naively, to explain what this person was doing. I took it all terribly seriously. I was trying to make it real for me. Whereas the director was doing the film to pay off his mortgage!”

Goodbye Gemini is based on the 1964 novel Ask Agamemnon and features a great period soundtrack by first time composer Christopher Gunning, who would go on to score dozens of TV series and films, including the recent Oscar-winning La Vie En Rose (2007). There would appear to be very little commercial appeal in this story of a brother and sister who love and kill together, but thankfully this was a time of risk-taking and experimentation in the British industry. They were even able to bring Sir Michael Redgrave on board in a significant role as a politician who spends his evenings attending the wrong kind of parties.