An attempt to make a modern-dress Gothic melodrama that is just not successful. Ernest Dickerson has a good grasp of the iconography of horror films, but he can't put them together well enough to make a good scary movie. He borrows concepts and images liberally from Clive Barker, Dario Argento, and Mario Bava - but all it shows is that he's a good copycat, not that he's a good stylist. From the idea of evil reviving itself by consuming a victim (Barker's "Hellraiser", but cinematic ally dating at least back to Hammer's "Dracula, Prince of Darkness" from 1965), thru the rain of maggots (Argento's magisterial "Suspiria"), to the disembodied hand reaching out of the darkness to torment the dead man's lover (Bava's masterpiece, "Whip and the Body"), there really is nothing here that we haven't seen before and better. The conceit of setting it in a ghetto with an all-black cast promises an interesting variation on your basic "revenge from beyond the grave" scenario, but beyond the music and fashions it's still a pretty clichéd film. One of the problems is that Dickerson just can't seem to leave well enough alone - like the maggot scene. OK, it's raining maggots and it's terrifying, we get it already, is it really necessary to go for the gross-out by showing people EATING them? Or the scene where Maurice is killed - again, the dog-spirit eats Maurice to give form and substance to Bones' cadaver, we get it, it's not necessary to linger on the details of the chow-down. It's never scary - just disgusting. Even his attempts to inject humor are forced and heavy-handed, with the idiotic scenes of Bones carrying the heads of his victims and having them carry on an interminably pointless conversation. And again, he doesn't show it to us once, there's at least three long scenes with the chatty heads so whatever humor there was is pounded into unconsciousness thru repetition. But the most glaring problem with this movie is that we are asked to sympathize with a character who is, at bottom, just as big a bad guy in life as the crack dealers who murder him. Dickerson tries to show us Bones as the protector of his 'hood, but come on - he's exploiting his people just as much with his numbers game, or did it never occur to anyone to ask how Bones got the money for his supah-dupah fly crib when everyone else around him lives in complete poverty? For a MUCH better horror movie that reflects the black urban experience, rent "Tales from the Hood" instead.
Review of Bones
