If we’ve heard it once, we’ve heard it a thousand times; a young pair of Japanese girls head off for a relaxing spa weekend in the woods, get into a fight over boys, become pursued by an angry mob of homicidal local residents along with a revenge-crazed harajuku girl wielding enormous pairs of scissors, and begin to unlock the secret behind the region’s legacy of blood rites and human sacrifice. Wait, what? X-Cross (pronounced Criss-Cross) aka Ekusu Kurosu: Makyà ´ Densetsu aka XX starts off promisingly enough, with at least the threat of seeing something weird enough to qualify as original. Rewinding from the two girls, Aiko and Shiyori, arriving on their getaway weekend, we jump back to the fate of the last girl who made her way to the quaint getaway resort. Tied to an enormous cross beam (one of the film’s many, many references to its title), we witness firsthand the village’s longstanding tradition of female ritual amputation. It doesn’t take long for mild intrigue to become replaced with brazen anarchy, however, something XX has in droves.
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