Bones (2001)
Grade: D-
Cast: Snoop Dogg, Pam Grier, Various No-Names
Director: Ernest R. Dickerson
Rated R for violence/gore, drug content, language, and sexuality


Why is it that the hardest cinematic tightrope to walk is horror? When horror succeeds, it succeeds tremendously. Look at 2001’s “The Others” and “Session 9”, two terrifying horror films with depth (one could argue that “The Others” is not a horror film, but I think it is, with the intense atmosphere, the “boo!” scares, etc. …but I digress). But in the past four years, my top five worst lists have included “Valentine”, “Dracula 2000”, “Urban Legends: Final Cut”, “House on Haunted Hill”, and “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer”. When horror fails, not only is it bad—it’s extremely boring and monotonous.

Those horror films mentioned above have almost no redeeming value, and the can only wish to have the presence of rapper/wannabe-actor Snoop Dogg (who also starred in last year’s mediocre “The Wash”, very good “Training Day”, and excellent “Baby Boy”). Yes, Snoop Dogg is charismatic to be sure. He has a bizarre figure (on screen, at least in “Baby Boy”, he appears to be about eight feet tall with oversized twigs for arms and legs and with a human’s version of a dog face), but he manages to be funny and intimidating at the same time. Funny and intimidating are not adjectives that could describe his star vehicle, the awful horror film “Bones”. I think it was meant to turn him into a movie star (really, those other films were just supporting roles for him). Keeping your star off screen for an hour of your 95-minute movie is as fatal a miscalculation as is humanly possible. Without Snoop Dogg, “Bones” rambles around aimlessly, and with Snoop Dogg, it’s an over-the-top exercise in gore and special effects, and it’s very funny and scary (although not in the way it’s supposed to be; I laughed at the scares and was scared of the campy humor). Even the Dogg’s presence couldn’t save the rest of the movie.

The backstory: Jimmy Bones refused a drug deal and got killed.
The story: Some kids are creating a nightclub out of an abandoned house.
Why the kids are screwed: Jimmy Bones’…um…bones…are in the house and he is inexplicably regenerating.

We get a long, long, LONG setup before we even get the flashback to Jimmy Bones’ death, and a lot of weird facial expressions are supplied by Pam Grier, so great in the wonderful “Jackie Brown”, and so overcooked in this turkey. There are some fake “BOO!” scares along the way, but none of them are scary in the slightest bit. There is some uneasy comedy along the way, but none of it is funny in the slightest bit. Am I getting boring? So was the movie.

Bones comes back to life and wants to get revenge on the old friends who betrayed him, but we can never tell if we like him or not. Bones was so nice and saintly back when he was alive, and now his friend is deeply guilty and tries to apologize various times before getting brutally murdered. I think someone in the writing department was confused about the definitions of ‘protagonist’ and ‘antagonist’, because Bones is somehow a bizarre combination of the two. Snoop Dogg, so watchable in his other three 2001 films, actually tries to act here, in the scene where he reunites with his old girlfriend (Grier). I can’t tell if he’s capable of better, or if this is his best.

“Bones” never contradicts the typical bad horror form: it is boring and monotonous. It also has the typical scenes of nudity and gratuitous gore, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the scene like the one here in which the killer chops off a head and carries it around, while the disembodied head won’t shut up about the basically annoying dilemma he is in. Now I know why screenwriters get paid so much.


-Alex, August 2002