Bones. 2001. USA. Directed by Ernest Dickerson. Written by Adam Simon, Tim Metcalfe. With Snoop Dogg, Pam Grier, Khalil Kain, Clifton Powell, Bianca Lawson, Michael T. Weiss. 96 min.
“This here is the story of Jimmy Bones / Black as night, and hard as stone / Gold plated deuce like the King of Siam / Got a switchblade loose and a diamond on his hand.” It’s 1979, and numbers runner Jimmy Bones (Snoop Dogg, in a nuanced dual performance) is the ultimate smooth criminal—fine threads, flash car, unflappable calm—but he also keeps the cops under control and drugs out of the neighborhood… until his betrayal and murder at the hands of his lieutenants and a dirty detective. Cut to 2001, as a quartet of teenagers who move into Bones’ former house to start a nightclub in the old neighborhood—which has been laid low by crack, crime, and police corruption—inadvertently unleash his vengeful soul. Packed with loving homages to Blackula, Italian giallo, and genre touchstones like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Ernest Dickerson’s neo-Blaxploitation parable expands the haunted house to the haunted ’hood, where its former guardian angel returns to gleefully punish the systemic ills that conspire to marginalize Black and Brown urban communities.