There’s a part of Westchester, New York, the saying goes, that you want to avoid, particularly at night. Buckout Road is a lonely, winding stretch in a remote. A two mile stretch where, legend has it, bad shit has repeatedly gone down.

What kind of bad shit, you ask?

How about a cult of albino cannibals who, a la Bloody Mary, will come out and eat you if you honk your horn three times in front of an old, dilapidated red house. Or three women burned at the stake as witches in the 1600s? All that’s left are three Xs where, if you drive over them…well, strange things happen. Or how about Mary Buckhout, who hanged herself and returns at night, dressed in all white and beckoning with a lamp. Or even Isaac Buckhout who, after suspecting his wife of cheating on him, bashed her skull in with a gun.

Gruesome tales. The stuff of urban legends that we see across the world. But the Westchesterians believe their two-mile winding road is the most haunted place in America. So what a perfect place to stage a creepy ghost story.

Director Matthew Currie Holmes must have thought the same thing. So we have The Curse of Buckout Road, written by the director and Shahin Chandrasoma based on a story by Johnny Pascucci and it is a mixed bag of some good ideas and some decent acting, but it’s hampered by some iffy execution and some…well, poor acting.

“Why do we create and then destroy myths,” Stephani Hancock (Mayko Nguyen) asks her bored class, before hanging herself on Buckout Road. She had been seeing a psychiatrist named Lawrence Powell (Danny Glover) and had been complaining about dreams foretelling her demise. He gets pulled into the police station by his friend and police chief Detective Roy Harris (Henry Czerny) to figure out her mental state and diagnosis.

The death sends reverberations throughout her class, particularly with Detective Harris’s daughter Cleo (Dominique Provost-Chalkley), and Cleo’s two bumbling friends, brothers Derek (Jim Watson) and Erik (Kyle Mac), all of whom had recently finished a class project mocking the legends surrounding Buckout Road. They are all now having prophetic dreams and are sleepwalking, much like their late teacher. Meanwhile, Lawrence’s grandson Aaron (Evan Ross) has just returned home from his military training and has a very icy relationship with Dr. Powell, who took him in after his parents died in a fire.

Eventually, Aaron ends up involved in Cleo, Derek and Erik’s misadventures and create a sort of Scooby Crew, minus talking dog. But when tragedy strikes, Aaron finds himself unable to break free of the curse that seemingly has latched onto him and his friends.

Matthew Currie Holmes and Shahin Chandrasoma bring a lot of big ideas and ambition to the story by mixing in three disparate urban legends surrounding Buckout Road to mixed results. At it’s best, it provides a fun wink and a nod to earlier staples of genre filmmaking. For instance, when telling the story of the albino cannibals, the presentation turns to a badly used grindhouse flick, complete with dirt and tearing and a kind of sepia tone to it. I wish they had taken it a bit further and differentiated the other stories in unique ways. The first third has a scare or two that worked pretty well and the big gets in terms of the production are Danny Glover, Henry Czerny and a barely used Colm Feore, who mainly shows up to be Reverend Exposition.

It’s when the focus turns on the young adult cast that it starts to get a bit messy. The acting ranges from decent to wooden, sometimes in the same scene. And with a tone that constantly changes, I’m not sure if what I’m watching is supposed to be purposely funny or not. The narrative takes a long time to get going and then branches more into dreams than I expected, particularly as it rounds into the third act. It feels inspired, in some ways, by A Nightmare on Elm Street’s mix of reality and fantasy.

Some late game revelations add some nice wrinkles, but by then I didn’t particularly care for the characters it was happening to. Which is shame. It’s obviously made with love. A lot of care and attention went into researching the urban legends surrounding Buckout Road and the budget is decidedly on the micro level. It brings interesting ideas to the table, I just think the script needed a bit more work to really sell what it was going for.