Extra Ordinary
Thin-but-likable offbeat Irish horror-comedy.
Extra Ordinary (2020). Grade: B-
Maeve Higgins is a driving instructor; mostly teens, the occasional adult. But she keeps getting phone calls unrelated to her driving lessons. They’re about her “other” talent; her ability to talk to g-g-g-ghosts.
You see, her father was a famous expert on the supernatural. Well, maybe not famous, but he made a bunch of VHS videos on the subject (like, how to expel poltergeists haunting your house and such). And some people still have those videos. And young Maeve, still only a girl then, was often her dad’s assistant.
He wasn’t a fraud! Maeve actually CAN see ghosts. But she made a slipup during one of their ghost-ridding rituals; and because of the accident, her beloved dad died. So she’s sworn off the whole de-ghosting business forever! Forever, she’s declared!
Well, maybe ONE more time…
That’s the premise of Extra Ordinary, a light-as-a-feather horror comedy from two (I presume) Irish writer-directors, Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman. It’s the first feature for each, although both had done some shorts before.
Its best asset is star Maeve Higgins. Higgins, originally from Ireland, is a comic and an author; in 2018, she wrote an article for The Progressive that’s better-informed than most Americans when it comes to the shameful history of America’s racist immigration laws. (She lives in New York, now.)
She’s playing a single, somewhat lonely lady here, yet not one who’s wallowing in self-pity. Just someone who misses her dad a lot, and would be up for dating if the right person came along.
Enter handsome Barry Ward, who isn’t looking for a date — he’s looking for an exorcist. One morning he leaves the shower to see the ominous words “You will pay” finger-painted on the mist of his bathroom cabinet mirror; then he sees the rest of the message, “the car tax.”
It’s Ward’s late wife, Bonnie. She’s an invisible ghost who can’t be heard, but she can move objects around. She picks out clothes for Ward to wear every morning; she reminds him not to eat doughnuts. He misses her in real life and doesn’t want to lose her completely, yet he’d like to have the occasional doughnut. (And yes, he'd already remembered to pay the car tax.)
So Ward takes one of Higgins’s driving courses, learns how to drive really quickly (he already knows how), and reveals his real reason for calling up Higgins; he wants her to do something about the ghost. She’s sympathetic to his plight, yet she’s absolutely firm on the subject; no more de-ghosting for her.
Until a short while later, when Ward calls her in a panic; his daughter is floating above her bed, motionless, unable to wake up. Now, most people who want Higgins’s help have problems like ghosts rattling garbage can lids or slightly discoloring the wallpaper; they’re easy to refuse. But this might involve a teenager’s life! So Higgins comes out of retirement to see if she can help.
What neither of them know is who caused it; it’s Will Forte. Forte’s an American rock musician who had one hit single, years ago; it made him enough money to move to a castle-sized mansion in Ireland. But he hasn’t had a hit song since. So he’s made a deal with the devil; if he sacrifices a virgin to Satan, he’ll get his hitmaking powers restored. The last virgin he kidnapped unfortunately exploded before the demonic ritual could be performed, so Forte needs to find a new one. Forte consults his trusty virgin-finding staff (which has the shape of a schlong on the end of it); the staff leads him to Ward’s shop, where he’s chatting with his daughter. Bingo! Forte’s found a new virgin to sacrifice. And that’s why Ward’s daughter is floating; it’s Step One of virgin retrieval.
The staff, by the way, doesn’t point to a virgin when you hold it; only when you drop it. So Forte has to keep picking it up and dropping it again, one staff-length at a time. His wife, Claudia Winter, suggests that maybe he should at least drive into the middle of town before dropping the staff any more; it might save him a lot of dropping time.
That’s the kind of offbeat humor you get when this movie is at its best; like when Forte is about to perform his final, dastardly ritual, and his wife interrupts to chew out the Chinese food delivery guy for getting the order slightly mixed-up. Or pretty much anytime Higgins is on the screen; she’s constantly coming up with little low-key zingers. (She’s listed as an “additional writer” on the movie’s very meager website, so I’m guessing a bunch of her funny lines are improvised.)
It turns out that the way to break the evil spell on Ward’s daughter is to apply enough ectoplasmic goo. Where do you get ectoplasmic goo? From a ghost exorcism. So Higgins starts answering all those weird “my trash can lids are banging” phone calls, finding out if there are actual ghosts involved, then transposing their souls into Ward. Once they’re in Ward, Higgins can send them to the next world, and Ward will cough up some white goo — that’s the ectoplasm. (One hopes, for Ward’s sake, that it was made of something that didn’t taste yucky — he sure has to cough up quite a lot of it.)
Unfortunately Ward doesn’t quite have the comic chops that Higgins does, so these bits where he’s inhabited by a ghost aren’t as funny as they could have been. (They’re also not written as funnily as they should have been; all the ghosts are variations of the kind of “yelling nagger” that the Pythons would play in wigs.) But Ward is quite likable as a straight man and a caring single dad; you can’t blame Higgins one bit for starting to think there might be a spark lighting.
Weirdly less funny than Ward — who isn’t a comic — is Will Forte, who IS a comic. I’ve liked Forte in certain things; I enjoyed him day drinking with Seth Myers and in his serious role as the son of a cranky half-demented parent in Nebraska. He’s really kinda overdoing it here, though, and since this was directors Ehern and Loughman’s first movie, they might not have felt comfortable enough to tell him it wasn’t working. Or they might have found it hilarious on set; sometimes, something that’s very funny in person just doesn’t work for the camera as well. Forte’s never unpleasant to watch in this movie, he’s not bad — he’s just not very funny. I think it’s because he overplays the “slimy evil” too much. If it was just a regular guy who was doing these really hideous evil things, it would have been funnier.
Ehern/Loughman have better luck with the rest of the supporting cast; Terri Chandler as Higgins’s very vulgar, very pregnant sister, and Brian Welsh as her boyfriend, a mousy-yet-well-meaning guy (he’s also on the town council, he informs Higgins unhelpfully when she’s in the middle of a ghost crisis). Neither Chandler or Welsh have a lot of screen time, but you like them, they’re good-natured and funny. Emma Coleman as Ward’s daughter is asleep/floating most of the film, but she’s given a choice line at the climax, and she nails it.
The climax makes the movie; it’s very broad comedy, but it is very funny. The action all centers around Forte’s mansion, where he’s managed to summon a demon for the sacrifice. Which is a really neat demon! It’s basically a CGI floating ghost sheet. I usually hate CGI effects, because they’re trying to impress us and almost always failing; this isn’t trying to impress us, and so it works! That’s something young indie filmmakers should learn from this movie; a simple, well-imagined effect will cost you a lot less and work for the audience a lot more.
Basically, the reason to see this is for how really smart and funny Maeve Higgins is here (and she’s written a book, Maeve in America, that’s also gotten good reviews and sounds like it could be fun). She’s playing a lonely single lady you’re not asked to pity or to ridicule; you know someone this quick-witted is gonna find a match before long. And (spoiler!), Higgins does in the end, here — and has another terrific line you won’t expect right at the end of the movie.
This isn’t quite as good as Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, yet it’s in the same vein; a horror comedy with some real sweetness at its core. And it’s fun seeing some of the elements of horror movies played lightly, and spoken with a breezy Irish accent.
One major, major criticism of this movie though… and it’s not the film, it’s the video company which printed the DVDs. (Cranked Up Films, I think, but someone else may be responsible — I don’t want to blame the wrong people.)
There aren’t any subtitles. That’s friggin’ horrible. What if somebody with hearing difficulties wants to watch this?
Honestly, young low-budget filmmakers; this movie can teach you a way to get decent effects on the cheap. But another thing you should learn is, INSIST the video copy of your movie has subtitles! Make it contractual!
Geez, video company! How cheap and thoughtless can you be?
When it comes to companies making money off of movies, though, that’s a rhetorical question.