Kiss Me, Kill Me

Looks funny, right?

Here’s another Korean lesson: 방(bahng) means room. So your bedroom is your 방 bahng. There are singing rooms called nore 노레 (song) 방 bahngs. And there are DVD 방 bahngs, which are basically private movie theatres.

Tonight, Ashley, Hanna, and I visited one. Since we were sans guys, we figured a nice, light romantic comedy would be fun. So we picked “Kiss Me, Kill Me,” a romance between a hit-man and his hit. Considering the cover, I was looking forward to some good fluff: hot guy goes to kill cute girl; cute girl disarms him; bizarre connection blossoms; la-di-dah, they discover they love each other.

Sort of.

Except that after disarming him, the girl steals the gun and tries to use it on herself. With a swift kick to the wrist, he then disarms her and soon discovers she ordered the hit on herself because she was suicidal and wanted to go out with a 방 (couldn't help it). 

He begins to spend his pathetic, friendless existence ordering her not to kill herself, even though he himself has very little worth living for. Their first date is a day-long awkward-fest at an amusement park in which neither of them look at one another, nor smile, nor speak. At the end of it, he takes out a dozen roses he had hidden in his jacket all day long and throws them at her, yelling at her for being crazy. Every time the romantic tension got close enough for them to kiss, bad guys show up with guns or metal rods or with polite bowing and break up all that mushy nonsense.

She crashes her ex-boyfriend’s wedding with a gun, and his job as a hit-man is endangered by a younger new guy. But when they duke it out, he loses and is slowly being stabbed to death when she finds them and uses her wedding-crashing revolver to shoot the younger hit-man. Both men are wounded, but they part on good terms—the younger leaving before the cops come at which point our main hit-man grabs the girl and uses her as a willing body shield in order to make it to the get-away car. Unfortunately, he gets shot and bleeds to death in her arms.

Sort of.  Actually, the final scene is their reunion...during prison visitor hours.

So, yeah, it was a chick flick: hot guy (who lives for the thrill of murder) goes to kill cute girl (who is suicidal because of love); cute girl disarms him (and tries to use the gun on herself); bizarre connection (based on mutual ineptitude at living) blossoms; la-di-dah, they discover they love each other (despite an unknown number of years in jail to follow).

Thank you, Korea.