I have a confession to make: I hate "evil twin" stories. There have been, to date, 750,899 versions of the "sinister sibling" on American television alone. Add in the innumerable feature films that feature "terrible twosomes" and we're talking 4.5 million times that this hackneyed approach has been used. Even George Romero, an otherwise mostly original filmmaker, used the doppelganger (in his version of THE DARK HALF, Stephen King's hackneyed retelling of The Evil (br)Other story). Enough, already. Anybody who thinks this is anywhere near Tsukamoto's best simply hasn't got a clue. It's better than A SNAKE OF JUNE, but that's not saying a whole lot. How does it stack up against his earlier films? It don't. Period.
