Sunday, July 13, 2014


Movie Review

Bones (2001)

October 24, 2001

FILM REVIEW; A New Disco Has a Twisted Past and Present

Published: October 24, 2001

One way to judge the relative quality of a horror movie is by examining its vision of hell. Just how original and how hellish is it? By that standard, Ernest Dickerson's Halloween-ready scream fest, ''Bones,'' ranks high.

Much of the movie is set in a sinister abandoned church-like structure that sticks out like a boiling excrescence in a blighted urban neighborhood. Its only occupant, besides thousands of rats, is an insatiably carnivorous black dog that has glowing red eyes and can polish off a mound of hamburger in seconds flat. That dog has an appetite for people as well as hamburger. But since it doesn't digest humans easily, it has a way of vomiting up their maggot-covered remains in the face of whomever is standing too close.

When a group of enterprising young people buy the building for a song and turn it into a disco, little do they know that its canine guardian is an evil spirit patrolling a gateway into hell. That hell turns out not to be the usual ho-hum place of sinners writhing in eternal flames, but a squirming sea of limbs and contorted tarry faces packed like sardines in an endless black ocean of pain. If you get too close, their sticky, dripping hands claw at you to drag you into a screaming din.

In exalting the very worst of humanity, ''Bones'' displays a special glee and an unusual density of scary imagery. The vengeful spirit haunting the place is a former street hustler and neighborhood legend, Jimmy Bones (Snoop Dogg), who was murdered by his partners in the late 1970's after refusing to make a deal with a corrupt police officer. On the disco's opening night, all hell literally breaks loose. And Jimmy comes back from the dead to wreak his revenge.

As Jimmy, the rap star Snoop Dogg is every inch the sly, strutting. silky-voiced street hustler, casting malicious sidelong glances through narrowed eyes. His coldness makes him ultimately scarier than most conventional Hollywood monsters with their dripping fangs and slimy lizard fins.

Hanging around the neighborhood is his surviving sweetheart, Pearl (Pam Grier), who was forced at gunpoint to participate in his murder. A tarot card reader and conductor of seances, Pearl lives next door to the accursed house with her beautiful daughter, Cynthia (Bianca Lawson), who becomes involved with Patrick (Khalil Kain), one of the club owners.

Just when ''Bones,'' directed from a script by Adam Simon and Tim Metcalfe, has pretty much used up its arsenal of shocks and special effects (the usual jump-cut montages and double exposures, expertly deployed), it flashes a sense of humor. Its best joke gives new meaning to the term ''talking heads,'' as the severed heads of two of Jimmy's victims continue blabbering while he carries them around like trophies.

Underneath the horror, the movie is a nasty parable about escapees from the ghetto and its long shadows. The middle-class children who buy this horror house are unaware that their seemingly respectable father was one of its owners and a reluctant collaborator in Jimmy's brutal demise. He has blood on his hands and corruption in his past. As they say, what goes around comes around.

''Bones'' is rated R. It has abundant gore, profanity, violence and sexual situations.


Directed by Ernest Dickerson; written by Adam Simon and Tim Metcalfe; director of photography, Flavio Labiano; edited by Michael N. Knue and Stephen Lovejoy; music by Elia Cmiral; production designer, Douglas Higgins; produced by Lloyd Segan, Peter Heller and Rupert Harvey; released by New Line Cinema. Running time: 93 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Snoop Dogg (Jimmy Bones), Pam Grier (Pearl), Khalil Kain (Patrick), Ricky Harris (Eddie Mack), Clifton Powell (Jeremiah Peet), Bianca Lawson (Cynthia) and Michael T. Weiss (Lupovich).

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