Yeah, like pretty much every other horror movie that hits the theaters, this one took a pretty heavy trashing both, from the critics and from the audiences who didn't understand it. However, I found "Bones" to be a highly enjoyable, entertaining, and (at times) creepy horror flick that I hope, is the birth of a new franchise. It's very refreshing to see a horror flick that can take a standard premise and make it seem fresh again. Also, I enjoyed the killer being a someone who we can sympathize with. Let me break it down a little bit.
Back in 1979, Jimmy Bones was the man of his neighborhood. Just what all he was into is never fully explained, but we do know that he runs a pretty classy little nightclub and loves to dress in full-pimp get-up. Basically, Bones is a good guy. All he wants to do is run his business and take care of his people. However, when he is propositioned to bring in crack, he refuses and is double-crossed then murdered by people he thought he could trust.
Jump twenty years into the future and we get a group of twenty-somethings who have just bought the building where Bones was murdered. Hoping to turn the place into a club, they ignore all warnings of the place's evil and pretty soon, they mess around and wake the dead. Now that Bones is back, he's upset, understandably, and wants revenge on the people who did him wrong.
That's it. Kinda sounds like Nightmare On Elm Street right? Well, it's a lot like it and a lot of others you may have seen. What set this one apart for me was the lead. Casting Snoop Dog as Jimmy Bones was perfect. I've never been a big fan of his acting, but here, he pulls it off great giving us a villain that we can sympathize with, care about, and root for. We know where he's coming from and watching him take his revenge on the dispicable villains was fun fun fun. I also enjoyed the romantic angle brought to the film by the chemistry between Snoop and Pam Grier. I don't think that it would have gone down near as well had there been a different set of actors, but it gave a real soft side to Bones and made me like him that much more.
I really loved the cinematography and having the blood look intentionally fake, was also a nice touch. Unlike some others, I really enjoyed the shifting in tones. The first 2/3 of the picture had a really dark and gothic tone to it while the latter third had a little bit of comic relief thrown in. Yes, it went WAY over the top (the severed heads, that whole "world of the dead" bit) but, for me, that added to the overall joy of the film and made it that much more. It also made it VERY hard to take it serious. It's pretty hard to find a good horror flick these days (and a mainstream one, at that) and I'm sure that I'll be adding this one to my dvd collection pretty soon. Oh, (I don't think I'm giving too much away here) the door is left open for a whole slew of sequels. I can't wait.
