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Bones (2001)

MARCH 29, 2020

GENRE: REVENGE, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

As a huge fan of Demon Knight, I couldn't remember why I didn't see Bones (aka Ernest Dickerson's long awaited return to the horror genre) when it came out in theaters, so I took a quick check at the box office charts for the time and saw that it came out the same weekend as Thirteen Ghosts and K-Pax, both of which I saw instead (was basically dragged to the former, and as for the latter - I chalk it up to my crush on Mary McCormack). But I'm glad I didn't see it then, because at the time I hadn't seen any of the "blaxploitation" horror movies it was paying homage to, which provided some of the fun I got out of it now. Back then, Pam Grier's appearance would have probably yielded a "Hey it's better than Ghosts of Mars last month" type reaction, but now I can smile that her tarot-reading character was a bit of a nod to the mystical woman she played in Scream, Blacula, Scream, which is a much better movie to think about.

Unfortunately, it's also riddled with bad CGI for many of Bones' appearances, which I assume only looks worse now than it did almost twenty years ago and, more importantly, throws off the '70s throwback vibe it's going for. I don't know if Snoop Dogg couldn't offer enough of his time to play the part and forced the filmmakers to use a series of "Option B" solutions to fill in the gaps (I didn't use a stopwatch or anything but it sure seems he's on-screen much less than his younger, lower-billed co-stars), but every dodgy effect makes the film less effective, and since you see some pretty terrible ones in the opening sequence the movie never gets a chance to earn much goodwill on that front. If a movie has a few bad VFX near the end once we are hooked in then it's not too bad, but when they're telling us right up front "We kinda botched our monster" it's hard to get too invested.

It's also too slowly paced for its own good, which has one benefit I'll talk about soon but for the most part also made it very difficult to cement my interest. The basic story is simple (and somewhat generic) enough: Jimmy Bones (Snoop) was a hustler/number runner back in the 1970s and was murdered by a corrupt cop, his partner, and a rival dealer, who covered up his death and swore an oath to never tell anyone. 20 years later, some enterprising youths - who happen to be the children of one of Jimmy's murderers - accidentally uncover his corpse when renovating the building to turn it into a nightclub. Eventually he is revived with the help of a demon dog of some sort and the movie becomes a blend of Nightmare on Elm Street and The Crow, with Jimmy taking out the assholes who murdered him (sympathetic!) and also the youths who just wanted to make something of their lives (much less so!).

The confusing morality doesn't help much either; we kind of want to root for Jimmy since he was murdered and, for the most part, didn't seem like that bad of a guy (he was killed for NOT wanting to sell hard drugs in the neighborhood, so that's something), but he's also going after the club owner kids who never did anything wrong, putting him more in Freddy Krueger's territory than Eric Draven's. In one scene you're rooting for him to take out the asshole drug kingpin or slimy crooked cop, but in the next you're hoping he is stopped - it's just too disjointed. The flashbacks are doled out in chunks throughout the first hour (the point where Bones is finally fully resurrected, another for the "con" list - hell, it's almost 40 minutes before they even find his corpse), which keeps it afloat since you naturally want to know how he died, how the characters in the present day factored into it, etc, but since it's not particularly novel, it's hardly worth the wait. They might have been better off with a lengthy opening flashback - it least it would have kept the lame CGI off-screen for 20 minutes or so.

All that said, I was highly impressed with how damn weird the movie got at times (spoilers for 20 year old movie ahead!), so it's ultimately more or less worth the wait, and certainly wasn't as generic as the first hour lulled me into believing the rest would be. Bones doesn't just kill someone - he somehow uses his powers to rip off their heads but leave them with the ability to talk as he carries them to his lair, which is a giant wall of twisting blackened bodies that looks like HR Giger tackling that thing that grabbed Freddy at the end of Dream Master. And he feeds this thing the heads - one of which is still trying to bribe Jimmy into letting him... "live"? It's hilarious. There's also a kill where he murders two drug dealers at once; instead of showing the actual murder we watch a blank wall that is splattered with human outlines of blood, followed by the rest of the blood "coloring in" those outlines, which doesn't make any sense at all but it's a pretty neat visual.

However you feel about the movie, we can all agree that Scream Factory's blu-ray is pretty jam-packed. It carries over everything from the original DVD (a Platinum Series release!) and adds several new interviews, though none with Snoop, sadly. He is on the old commentary though, with Dickerson and screenwriter Adam Simon, though I think they all partook in his trademark stash as it's the mellowest goddamn track I've ever heard with three grown men sitting together. Usually this kind of setup results in a pretty spirited discussion, but they're all so quiet and soft-spoken it felt like they were recording it while their parents tried to sleep in the next room or something. As for the new ones, they got Dickerson, Simon, the DP, and the always great Tony Gardner, who reveals that the wall of bodies were using, among other things, Bruce Campbell's chin appliances! FX guys are always reusing things from their shop and such reveals delight me every single time (all time fave - the heart that they "pencil stake" in From Dusk Till Dawn is Jason's from JGTH).

All of the pieces are there to make a solid "Elm Street meets Candyman" kind of film, and I was surprised to see that the film rarely went for laughs (I knew it was Freddy-ish, but was thinking more of his jokey era than the earlier, darker version), but the weird pacing and confused "antihero" approach kept me at arm's length almost from the start. Dickerson gives the big scare scenes the energy you'd expect, and the kids are actually kind of fun in their way (Katherine Isabelle can't ever be boring, she's always "on" even in the background of shots), but ultimately my big takeaway was that my "eh, it's fine" reaction would have been even more subdued if I saw it in 2001. And not because it's aged all that well - it's because back then I wouldn't have caught all the references to better movies. Can't vouch for K-Pax, but I think I ultimately made the better choice with Thirteen Ghosts (which is also coming from Scream Factory!).

What say you?