X-CROSS (Japan, 2007)
NEW YORK PREMIERE
103 minutes, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles
Directed by: Kenta Fukasaku
Starring: Nao Matsushita, Ami Suzuki, Hiroyuki Ikeuchi
Showtimes: SAT June 28 (Midnight Screening), 12:05am at the IFC Center [Buy Tickets];
Note: "Buy Tickets" links will take you to the IFC Center website (for shows at IFC Center) and to Japan Society website (for shows at Japan Society). Tickets for each venue must be purchased separately.
A glossy horror/action/thriller scored for two girls and two cell phones, this flick by the son of Japan’s famed genre director, Kinji Fukasaku, sees him finally find his stride. Shiyori (Nao Matsushita) is a good girl heading out into the country and up to a remote hot spring to soothe her broken heart after a bad break-up. Riding shotgun is the spice to her sugar, the leather to her lace, best galpal Aiko (Ami Suzuki) and after the two take a long soak they retire to their respective cabins and promptly discover that the village is a front for a cult of inbred, backwater leg fetish maniacs who live to amputate female legs. Split up from each other, they keep in touch via cell phone with the action constantly rewinding to show us what’s happening from multiple points of view.
Kenta Fukasaku hasn’t had it easy. His dad casts a long shadow, most famous in the west for his ambitious BATTLES WITHOUT HONOR series, but known in Japan as the journeyman director behind a slew of sci-fi, horror and action hits. Capping his career with his final masterpiece, BATTLE ROYALE, Kinji died during pre-production on BATTLE ROYALE II and his son, Kenta, who had been assisting, took over the project. The results were...unfortunate. His follow-up movies weren’t much better, mixing smash-dazzle setpieces with long, incomprehensible scenes loaded with clumsy exposition. But with X-CROSS he’s managed luck into the perfect match between his suddenly advanced technique and his super-trashy, super-fun material.
Never over-reaching, this is a slick horror thriller that’s lowbrow enough to please fans of the SCREAM movies, but highbrow enough to tickle the pleasure centers of cineastes. Fractured points of view and a storyline that whips itself back and forth in time propelled by frantic cell phone calls propel this flick to the front of the pack and Kenta F. shows that he’s talented enough to set up a surprise entrance by a secondary villain halfway through the movie, but crowd-pleasing enough to make the second villain a fresh-faced Lolita wielding a five-foot-long pair of scissors. Fukasaku’s got so many balls whirring through the air, and the audience is so dizzy, that it makes its own kind of ecstatic sense.
