"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.
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