BONES

Directed by Ernest Dickerson

With Snoop Dogg and Pam Grier

Playing at Showcase Cinemas, West Springfield

A demon dog with glowing red eyes vomits thousands of wriggly maggots onto a dance floor of writhing young bodies. A slimy tableau of Hell reaches out with grasping hands to snatch an unsuspecting victim. Severed heads are forced to stay alive, just so they can face eternal damnation. Bones, the supernatural revenge thriller starring rapper Snoop Dogg, may be pure trash, but it’s delectably gruesome trash. It may be the first horror film in years that isn’t actually good, yet still carries an oozy, visceral charge.

Two suburban black brothers, Patrick and Billy (Khalil Kain and Merwin Mondesir), their white sister Tia (Katherine Isabelle) and their friend Maurice (Sean Amsing) buy a rotting brownstone in the middle of a crime-laden ghetto, in hopes of turning it into a hip-hop dance club.

The boys’ father (Clifton Powell), a black man who left the ghetto for a white woman and successful life, is strangely nervous about the boys owning the building, while a local psychic (Pam Grier, looking less disdainful of the script than she did for Ghosts of Mars) warns about evil lurking in the wall.

In the ’70s the brownstone was owned by benevolent neighborhood protector Jimmy Bones (Dogg). Bones was a criminal, but he cared for those in the ‘hood, and refused to go in on a deal with a local dealer, a corrupt cop, and had his own right hand man to bring crack onto the streets. He wound up dead, his body buried in the basement, and his spirit looking for the right time to exact revenge.

Bones embraces clich