Holy Night: Demon Hunters: Aerobic Exorcise

"My honey loves his exorcisms," my bofriend says to me. And he's right. I'm an easy one to please when it comes to movies about spirit possession. Which means I'm definitely the target audience for Holy Night: Demon Hunters, a film in which Ma Dong-seok (b.k.a. Don Lee in Hollywood) clobbers Satan's minions with well-aimed punches and his sidekick videographer played earnestly by Lee Da-witt faithfully records the fisticuffs for posterity. The true hero of Lim Dae-hee's directorial debut, however, is the silver-streaked Sharon (Seohyun of KPop sensation Girls Generation) who can instinctively smell out evil and has mastered the tried-and-true rituals for getting those nasty devils to leave their human hosts, without ever damaging her manicure.

Per usual, holy water stings, voice registers drop, youthful faces decompose, and rooms turn ice-cold as Sharon frantically works to get the parasitic spirit to confess its name in order to banish the ghoul back to hell. Also per usual, a loved one -- in this case, the devoted sister (Gyeong Su Jin) of the victim (Jung Ji-so) -- almost foils all these efforts as she battles her own personal biases as a neuroscientist and her naivete as a bewildered sibling. Even the subpar special F/X feel on brand, although simply turning the camera upsidedown is more silly than scary. As a fan of the ridiculous, I have no notes to give. And my boyfriend watched the whole thing with me, suggesting some simple pleasures have a diabolically broad appeal.

Love & Leashes: Learning & Lusting

I've avoided Love & Leashes for a year because I assumed it wasa trashy Korean-style take on 50 Shades of Grey. But whereas the latter is a self-described erotic romance, the K-counterpoint is a rom-com that vacillates between after-school special and workplace satire. And so, the heroine (Seohyun) isn't merely an office worker being initiated into the fine art of BDSM by an junior exec (Lee Joon-Young), she's also a woman who should've had his job and is likely working out some inner frustrations via the cords and whips and leashes. So can a courtship be pure kink? And I'll be honest: There is something romantic in seeing a man who's that vulnerable and a woman who's in control. But as a YouTube tutorial pretty quickly points out: "It's hard to engage in S&M or Dom/Sub relationships within a romantic context since lovers are ideally equally partners." (Major paraphrase!) An online forum teaches her everything else she needs to know.

Once these two have signed a written (!) contract, the training begins — she's exploring dog play at semi-respectable hotel; pressing the stilettoes of her fancy red heels into his back; and dripping hot wax on his body while he's ballgagged. Will love emerge? Well, in real life, I've known two women who fell into long-term, currently ongoing relationships that started with role-playing so why the hell not. That Park Hyeon-jin's Love & Leashes also confronts the rampant sexism in office culture and the violent misogyny that undermines kink practices of veterans like the lead's best friend (Lee El) results in a surprising film that's shockingly good.