In the documentary Horror Noire, legendary cinematographer-turned-director Ernest Dickerson claims that his 2001 film Bones failed at the box office because distributor New Line Cinema insisted on marketing it as “a Black horror film” instead of just “a horror film,” emphasizing its cultural stereotypes instead of what makes it an oddball genre exercise in its own right. Having since caught up with Bones myself, I think that philosophical divide started long before New Line got involved. The film’s two white screenwriters, Adam Simon & Tim Metcalfe, originally pitched Bones as a kind of prototype for Black Dynamite: a 2000s era spoof of 1970s Blaxploitation relics, with a supernatural revenge premise borrowed from J.D.’s Revenge and in-dialogue references to titles like Three the Hard Way (when one character offers the conspiracy theory that fast-food fried chicken batter has been chemically altered to make Black men sterile). The movie got greenlit as soon as they attached Snoop Dogg to star, since he does look remarkably good modeling 70s hustler fashions as a walking-talking homage to classics like SuperFly & The Mack. Watching through the DVD’s bonus-feature interviews, I get the sense that Dickerson’s hiring changed the tenor of the project dramatically. While everyone else gushes about what a dream it was to work with Blaxploitation superstar Pam Grier in a throwback to that genre’s heyday (including a blushing Snoop Dogg, who was shy to kiss her on-camera), Dickerson instead goes on tangents about how excited he was to make a modern version of Mario Bava’s bug-nuts haunted castle movies like The Whip and the Body. The producers were thinking Blacula while the director was thinking Blood and Black Lace, muddling the central conceit beyond easy marketability.

Personally, I think the Bones marketing campaign failed because the title Ghost Dog was already claimed by Jim Jarmusch. The closest the film gets to a clear logline concept is in the earliest stretch when a hell hound with glowing red eyes is seemingly possessed by the undead spirit of a 1970s street hustler named Bones, played by Snoop Dogg in Blaxploitation-tinted flashbacks. It’s an easily digestible conceit that plays right into its star’s rap persona, and you can easily imagine how good it’d look on a poster if the core idea stopped there. Only, it turns out that Bones’s ghost isn’t only piloting the body of a rabid street dog; it’s also haunting an Old Dark House in the middle of the city, anchored there by the literal bones left behind after his murder in the 1970s. When the children of the traitors who stabbed him to death happen to discover this spooky mansion and plot to transform it into a hip nightclub, Bones is resurrected by feeding on their bodies one at a time, via his ghost-dog surrogate. However, even that conceit gets muddled by the time the house’s ghostly presence molests a sleeping teenager the audience knows to be Bones’s daughter. Is this a supernatural act of incest? Or is that heinous act carried out by one of the dozens of souls Bones has trapped in the house with him by adding them to his writhing, Cronenbergian flesh wall? Speaking of which, if he was only betrayed by several close friends, where did all of those extra souls come from to build that wall? And why is the dog still around after he gets his old body back? And what does it mean when that dog pukes a never-ending flood of maggots on the patrons of the underground nightclub that wakes him from his slumber? How does any of this work?

The answer to those questions might have mattered in pitch meetings and marketing strategies, but since Dickerson was pulling most of his inspiration from Bava-era Italo horror, no internal logic is required to propel the picture from scene to scene. Simon & Metcalfe establish a sturdily familiar structure to hang the film’s more impulsive ideas off of, marrying ghostly haunted-house revenge plots to a 70s Blaxploitation trope about the hero hustler who fights to keep hard drugs out of his community (seen both in classic titles like Disco Godfather and contemporary spoofs like Black Dynamite). Bones was murdered because he rejected a corrupt pig’s business pitch to poison his neighborhood with crack cocaine. So, when he gets his revenge from beyond the grave, he’s also fighting for the lost dignity of the community his former partners sold out for personal profit. What I don’t get the sense of here is that Dickerson cared about any of that while making the movie. He treats that familiar genre territory as a open playground where he can just try whatever surrealistic horror image comes to mind. In the earliest stretch, when Bones is still a disembodied spirit, Dickerson portrays him as a Nosferatu-style shadow creeping up the haunted nightclub walls in early-aughts CGI. Later, when he feeds on unsuspecting victims during that nightclub’s disastrous opening night, his body is rebuilt one layer of muscle at a time in grotesque stop-motion animation reminiscent of The Evil Dead. Once fully formed and walking around in his retro pimp gear, Bones starts making groaner quips about how he doesn’t need drugs because he’s enjoying “a natural high . . . a supernatural high.” There’s a uniform flatness to those one-liners’ delivery that again suggests the director was checked out from the written material, but you can also clearly see him having fun with Bones literally collecting heads during his quippy revenge mission, keeping his victims’ disembodied noggins alive & talking until they can be added to the flesh-wall soul collection in his inner sanctum.

There’s a glaring discordance between the playfulness of Bones‘s imagery and the going-through-the-motions drudgery of its dialogue, and that discordance is never more glaring than when we leave the haunted-house antics of the present to revisit the Blaxploitation homage of the past. The screenwriters had exactly one idea: casting Snoop Dogg as a vengeful ghost of a Blaxploitation hustler archetype. Inspired by free-for-all Italo horrors like Black Sunday, Suspiria, Burial Ground, Demons, Cemetery Man, and The Beyond, Dickerson put no limitations on his own ideas, throwing as many visual tricks and for-their-own-sake indulgences at the screen as the budget would allow. As a former cinematographer, you can tell he was having way more fun running around shooting the haunted house set from Bones’s ghost-cam POV than he was listening to anything Bones had to say. The movie would be a by-the-numbers bore without that gonzo anything-goes approach, but it is funny in retrospect to hear him complain that his distributor didn’t know how to market the resulting mess it left behind.

-Brandon Ledet