By John Corrado

★★★ (out of 4)

The Irish ghost comedy Extra Ordinary, which was the opening night film at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival last year where it played extremely well with the packed audience of horror fans, offers a fun and surprisingly charming twist on the supernatural genre.

Laced with a quirky and uniquely Irish sense of dry humour, the film follows Rose Dooley (Maeve Higgins, in a nicely understated comic performance). Rose is a modest driving instructor in rural Ireland, whose late father Vincent (Risteard Cooper) was a ghost hunter with a low budget television show where he investigated mundane local hauntings, right up until his untimely death.

While Rose shares her father’s gift of being able to communicate with the other side, she tries to ignore it in favour of living a quiet life. But Rose must tap into her supernatural abilities when she is contacted by mild-mannered single dad Martin (Barry Ward), who needs Rose’s help to lift a curse that has been put upon his teen daughter Sarah (Emma Coleman) by Christian Winter (Will Forte, having a blast going over the top), a Satan-worshipping former rock star who wants to sacrifice the virgin girl to the pits of Hell in order to reignite his musical career.

The feature debut of co-directors Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman, Extra Ordinary is an enjoyable little film that delivers pretty much everything you could want from a low budget supernatural comedy, right down to some delightfully old school special effects. It’s funny, a little gross, and not too scary, with a wild finale that offers some highly amusing twists on the “sacrificing a virgin” trope. Overall, I have to say that I enjoyed Extra Ordinary, and the film plays very well with a crowd, making it the sort of thing that could easily gain somewhat of a cult following down the line.

Extra Ordinary is now playing in limited release at Imagine Cinemas Carlton Cinema in Toronto.