Thrills, chills and tired tropes abound in Matthew Currie Holmes' halting horror debut, THE CURSE OF BUCKOUT ROAD

Evidently a hit at some of what we might call second-tier film fests -- the Pasadena International Film Festival the Hot Springs Horror Film Festival --  this new-to-cinemas-and-VOD scary movie, THE CURSE OF BUCKOUT ROAD proves an oddball mix, for sure.

The film begins most auspiciously, with moments of impending horror alternating with a college classroom scene in which a professor challenges her students with the question of why we need -- and then need to destroy -- our myths. Soon, the first corpse (of many to follow) appears, and we are off to the races once again.

As directed and co-written by Canadian actor-turned-filmmaker, Matthew Currie Holmes, shown at left, abetted by good cinematography (Rudolf Blahacek) and excellent editing (Lindsay Ljungkull), the movie takes place in the supposedly urban-legends-and-scary-stories capital of the entire USA, where a particular avenue called Buckout Road is clearly the worst place of all.

It sho' nuff' is. As soon as a character gets near the road (or even if they simply dream about it, for goodness sake), you can bet they're about to be dead. You might think that the town's police department would be just a little concerned, but the police chief (the always reliable Henry Czerny, below, right) seems more interested in badgering witnesses than in putting two and two together to arrive at... something supernatural!

Soon the town's eminent psychologist (Danny Glover, below, right) becomes involved, along with his estranged grandson (Evan Ross, below, left) and his about-to-be girlfriend, that police chief's daughter (Dominique Provost-Chalkley, above, left).

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There is also a pair of goofy fraternal twins who dream about Buckout Road (Kyle Mac and Jim Watson, shown seated below, left and right respectively). Mr. Mac gets the movie's funniest low-key line, "They're coming back, right?," more of which would have done a world of good.

The Curse of Buckout Road certainly is not an awful film. It has some decent-if-typical suspense (what's behind that door that just opened by itself?), surprise and shock (a supremely well-edited scene involving an apparition and a bathroom sink, below), clever flashbacks to the 1970s using grainy, handheld footage and, as expected given the cast, some decent performances.

But its insistence on tossing so much into its mix -- witches, albino zombies, and been-there/done-that/would-be scary/creepy things (as below) -- and then returning to each of these again and again eventually wears us viewers down. (Really now, do you have to show us more than once the same set of characters killing themselves?)

The plot, such as it is, does offer one nice surprise toward the end, and young Ross does well in his would-be "hero" role. Mr. Holmes and his movie seem to want to take us back to the former glory days of scary cinema, while using a number of more recent, modern additions to the genre. It works, I guess, off and on, and just might be enough to please horror aficionados.

From Vertical and Trimuse Entertainment, The Curse of Buckout Road opens theatrically this Friday, September 27, in Brooklyn, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Tampa and Riverside, California -- and will simultaneously be available via VOD.

Want something a little different? Sonia Barrett's dizzy documentary, THE BUSINESS OF DISEASE

If the page after page of written do's-and-don'ts that appear at the opening of this new would-be documentary don't make you a little wary of what will follow, I'll be surprised. First, we're told to take charge of our life and health, and then there's a disclaimer about all the logos we're going to see in the film and how these do not mean that the companies themselves sponsored or in any way financed this movie (as if). No, THE BUSINESS OF DISEASE instead spends its time flipping back and forth between a bunch of would-be "experts" on everything from sound to light to music to health to... I don't even know quite what some of these people's claim to fame is supposed to be. It's as though the documentary, as envisioned by its writer/producer/director Sonia Barrett (shown below) and its "editorial department" (click and scroll way down), offers some weird visual equivalent of the old jokester game of 52 Pickup. That's how bizarre is the entire organization of this film.

The movie begins by quoting from those very au courant folk Hippocrates and Thomas Edison, as visuals of the aforementioned logos fly by to some heavy-handed, pulsating music. Then the "experts"  begin bantering about herbs (better grow your own) and organic food and the body as energy and epigenetics and building a house around "your signature sound."  (Sound is very big here: We also hear about listening to the sound of one's refrigerator as well as sounds from outer space.) But it's all anecdotal, and -- via the manner in which it is presented -- comes off as faintly ridiculous.

Did nobody bother to tell Ms Barrett about the idea of organizing her material in order to make a case for her main idea?  Her thesis -- which seems to come down to "take charge of your life and health" -- is way too broad to begin with, but her examples of how we ought to do this don't begin to coalesce.

So we flip back and forth between speakers (and can't help wondering who gathered these people under the same roof and why they're even that important). One fellow, a certain Hal A. Huggins, DDS, has this immortal line to tell us: The "disease is gonna get more worse."  And yes, I am quoting verbatim.

We learn that sun glasses and sunscreen are bad for us because they don't allow the skin to repair itself. We hear about light and our "age of light," and art in the face of your cat. And I believe, somewhere in the midst of all this, someone tells us that our convictions should be flexible. Flexible convictions? What a great idea!

There are probably a few (very few) good things to be found in this mess of a movie, but I'll be damned if I could ferret them out from all the twaddle on display in this nitwit documentary. Among other oddities, it seems to be thoroughly against Obamacare. (It wants us to take charge of our life but has damn little to say about how we might afford to do that.)

When you keep using mere anecdotes as "proof," you're in big trouble. But, then, I suppose you would have to be intelligent enough to realize this. Instead, the speakers here, and especially filmmaker Barrett, appear to be blithely unaware of this or maybe have been roped into taking part in something from which they expected a lot more.

In the spirit of sparing undue embarrassment, I have deliberately left out any names of our guest lecturers pictured above (except for dentist Huggins, who is not shown), but I will note that the movie ends with yet another disclaimer. Unlike the earlier ones that are left on screen long enough for your to read them five or ten times, this one I think you might actually want to read. But it is gone before you can even do that.

The Business of Disease, which I feel has no business opening in an actual theater and roping in any poor paying customers, hits a New York City screen (the Quad Cinema) this Friday, February 20, and then arrives in Los Angeles one week later at the Laemmle Music Hall 3. Your move.