Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Bones

Movie Guru Rating:
Bad Karma (2 out of 5)

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Even the odd talents of Snoop Dogg can't save Bones

by Zak Weisfeld

The moral of the story, as always, is that when the giant, leering demon face appears above one's bed in the creepy old mansion and screams "Get out!," one should heed the giant, leering demon face and move quickly to the nearest exit. Yes, there's a downside to getting one's ass out the door. The nightclub that one intended to open in the creepy old mansion is gone as quickly as oneself. On the upside, however, one won't be covered with maggots, disemboweled, shot, immolated, eaten, slashed, strangled, beheaded and sent packing straight to a viscous, howling hell. What's amazing is that, despite eons of pop-cultural education, yuppie kids keep making the wrong choice.

Take the four kids from the suburbs who are going down to that spooky old mansion in the ghetto—the one that looks eerily like a skull, the one with the bloody claw marks on the front stoop—to open up their dream club. Sure, there's some work to do, and the plumbing keeps pumping blood up through the floor, but the dream of spinning the wheels of steel, of getting their music out there, keeps them going. Not even a dire warning from neighborhood psychic Pam Grier can dissuade these intrepid youngsters from pursuing their vision. Kids these days, amazing.

But what's more amazing is that a movie could be released in late 2001 and serve up the above mentioned "Get out!" scene without so much as a wink. Bones, as the saying goes, is kicking it old school. This is pre-Scream horror. Horror served straight, cheap and gory—no self-referential jokes, no white, suburban angst or irony—just ghosts and blood and vengeance from beyond the grave.

Which begs the question—is it a black thing? Is black culture somehow able to step outside white people's recursive loop of pop-cultural commentary? It's hard to say, and I certainly wouldn't want to make a case for it one way or the other based on Bones. Nor would I look too hard at the social commentary subtext. Sure, the first people to die are white frat boys. But in the end pretty much everybody dies except for one girl. Bones may be refreshing in the straightforwardness of its horror and its Snoop Dogg-provided street cred but it's not, by any definition a good, important or even memorable movie.

What Bones is is an incredibly derivative horror movie interwoven with an incredibly derivative gangster movie. From the "Get out!" scene, to the reverse decomposition of the skeleton, to a delightful rain of maggots, Bones doesn't so much comment upon earlier movies in its genre as sample them. But with so many samples, it's hard to know where Bones begins, and the movies it cops end. About the only unique element Bones brings to the table is the fleshing out (no pun intended) of its back story—the story of how Jimmie Bones, regular neighborhood gangster circa 1979, became Jimmie Bones, vengeful spirit hungry for blood circa 2001.

The problem is that the back story of Jimmie Bones, 1979, is quite a bit more interesting than the paint-by-number horror of the main part of the movie. The sense of a neighborhood and a culture about to change dramatically, and of Jimmie Bones' place in this world, are all things we'd like to know more about. Instead, we get a few scenes of Jimmie riding in his Cadillac and his brutal murder before we're quickly back to the even-more-brutal vengeance.

As the live Jimmie Bones, Snoop is appealing. He brings a fey, relaxed charm to the role of neighborhood gangster, playing Jimmie as a kind of stoned Eastwood—expressionless, cool, laid-back. But in high dudgeon—in full black leather pimp regalia and long, straightened hair—Snoop brings Jimmie across like the love child of Michael Jackson and Greg Allman. It's an impressive, if unsettling sight, and certainly one of the high points of the mostly low Bones.

But Snoop's cool isn't enough to shoulder the mushy pacing and clichéd scenarios of the script. Neither is Ernest Dickerson's direction. As a cinematographer (most notably with Spike Lee), Dickerson's always had a great eye for color and a feel for composition, but as a director he's not very light on his feet, which is something Bones desperately needs. Instead, the horror bogs down in a bewildering pastiche of special effects—few of which are actually scary and many of which fail to serve any purpose at all. In the end we're left with a muddled mess, with few scares and even less of a point.

If you're looking for real scares this Halloween season, I'd check out On the Line.