Film review: Extra Ordinary (2019)

This is a fun little one.  Basically it seems to be a vehicle for Maeve Higgins, an Irish comedian of whom I was previously unaware (who is effortlessly charming, if not necessarily the greatest actor), as Rose, the owner and proprietor of a tiny (as in one-car) driving school.

This is not much of a business, but it's her attempt at normalcy given that her real talents (or Talents, as her late father, whose face we see throughout the film on TV via the videos he made on various paranormal topics, refers to such abilities)

lie in communicating with ghosts, whom she can see wherever she looks. 

She and her father had a partnership where he would act as a vessel for the ghost and she would talk to them, but tragically her father embodied both the spirit of a dog and the spirit of the possessed pothole (!) the dog was trapped in, and because Rose forgot the incantation to free them both to send them to "the other side", he pranced off in front of a lorry.  However, as we see this in flashback, it is obvious that the father's spirit entered a magpie, who appears regularly throughout the film and has a crucial role at the climax.  Anyway, she wants no part of the business, although everyone keeps phoning her up asking her to get rid of various ectoplasmic problems.  Finally, Martin Martin tricks her into helping him with his bullying ex (and I mean ex) wife by booking a driving lesson as a pretext to pour his heart out.  Fortunately for him, Rose is very taken with him and agrees to help, just in time to be able to help him with a much more serious problem, which is that a Satanist one-hit-wonder American pop star Christian Winter (played with the usual bizarre panache by Will Forte) 

has cast a "Gloat" (short for floating goat - you'll have to watch the film to see why) spell on Martin's daughter, because he wants a virgin to sacrifice at the blood moon to become more than just a one-hit wonder.  Rose recognizes the problem and knows the solution: she and Martin (who turns out to share her father's ability to embody ghosts) have to collect ectoplasm by exorcising seven ghosts which they can then anoint the daughter with to break the spell.  Unfortunately for Martin, this involved vomiting up the ectoplasm into mason jars, but he's game.

Meanwhile Christian, along with his intensely annoying Australian wife (played by the very funny Claudia O'Doherty, who deserved better than her role)

are on to Rose, and set about trying to block her.  Christian in fact casts a spell to undo her powers, and then it's a race to see whether Rose, Martin, Rose's heavily pregnant sister "Sailor" and her current beau, town Councillor Brian can get to Christian's castle before the daughter is sacrificed.

The film is perfectly diverting, although it will not become a "horror comedy classic" mostly because it's not horrific enough (although there are moments towards the end).  It's more like the New Zealand film Housebound, which was actually better, I thought - both tenser and funnier.  However, there are enough moments to keep you engaged and most of the performers are very good and very good company.  It has a quirk that a lot of movies seem to have these days of being set in an indefinable near-past.  Is it the 80s?  The clothes and cars (and the fact that Christian's one hit was clearly no later than the early 70s) would seem to indicate so.  Is it the late 90s/early aughts?  They've got the right (Nokia) phones for that.  Rose also likes to come home and sit on a yoga ball while she eats a yogurt in her Spanx-like underwear, and I don't remember yoga balls being a thing before at least the early aughts.  Anyway, check it out once you've watched Housebound and decided "I want more like that!"