Holy Night: Demon Hunters

This ain’t a story for a 90 minute movie.

No proper setup, no proper development, ridiculous conclusion - this is what I’ve got from a story that was in fact quite interesting if explored enough.

As a movie it was bad. Honestly close to nothing works. I didn’t get to see the team long enough to care for their teamwork. I’ve got 30 seconds of flashbacks to know about their past, so as individual characters they are also giving me close to nothing. The world built up was just confusing because of how vague it was. Yes, I understand the most basic rules and premises, but with how complex the lore seems, I could as well know nothing.

Ba U is punching demons back to tell, Sharon is exorcising demons back to hell, Kim Gun is there making vlogs - the hell was this dynamic? Yes, they did show us Kim Gun doing some research, but they for sure focused more on him running around with a camera. He seemed quite… useless.

The exorcism scenes were ridiculous. Mix match of everything. It gave me Marvel meets Exorcist meets any fighting focused video game meets every found footage horror.

The best part of the movie? The animated ending scene. And here’s the thing - this would not only work better as a series, but especially animated series. With the crazy aesthetics and over the top drawings? This would be a hit. As a movie, even with crazy CGI, it gave discount vibes.

The acting was fine. The characters were such a stock bunch it’s hard to tell at times if the delivery was good or not. The effects were decent, but there was literally zero creativity behind the design of all the supernatural elements.

Overall, skip.

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Forgettable

First off, I'm a big fan of Ma Dong Seok's movies, but I also am not crazy about the horror genre.
This being said, I gave this a 7/10.

The movie suffers from the fact that the prequel is hard to come by. "Holy Night: The Zero" is a web toon that lays the foundation for this movies story and without it, it just feels like there is something missing. We don't really know the backstory and the why for several of the subplots.

Don Lee and his typical "knock'em out", "I'm invincible" charm was to me the highlight of this movie.
Gyeong Su Jin's character came off as annoying, but not because of bad acting, because of how the role was written. One minute she's so tough that she trys tondo everything on her own, and the next minute, she's so scared that she cannot do the easiest thing.

The story of this film was OK and the production was done well, but that's not enough to save this movie. I feel my 7/10 is being generous.

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