Grade: C

We haven’t had a nifty talking heads flick in a long while. I don’t mean a picture with David Byrne or a “My Dinner With Andre” conversation piece, but rather a picture with actual disembodied noggins chattering away despite the absence of their torsos. The classic of this rather small, select genre is of course Stuart Gordon’s “Re-Animator” (1985), but one can also point to Will Cowan’s “The Thing That Couldn’t Die” (1958), as well as–if you stretch standards a bit–Ridley Scott’s “Alien” (1979), even if Ian Holm’s character turned out to be robotic. This splashy new offering from Ernest Dickerson is by any reasonable standard a terrible movie, but in the last act it does feature two decapitated villains babbling and joking for long stretches. The effect is more funny than frightening, but that’s obviously the idea, and it’s actually pretty characteristic of “Bones,” a gruesome, gloppy, goofy but perversely amusing shlockfest that will probably appeal to young audiences looking for a Halloween date flick that might not make sense but is reasonably cool.

If you’ll pardon the pun, the plot of “Bones” is a skeletal affair. In 1979 a streetwise numbers kingpin, Jimmy Bones (Snoop Dogg), looking like a refugee from the original “Shaft” series, was murdered by a trio of bad-guys who fail to persuade him to join the drug trade–an up-and-coming gangster (Ricky Harris), one of Jimmy’s own lieutenants Clifton Powell), and the obligatory crooked cop (Michael T. Weiss). (Bones’ own bodyguard and his squeeze Pearl are also involved, though not entirely voluntarily–the death scene, which we see a good way in, resembles the killing in “Murder on the Orient Express.”) More than two decades later, the baroque house where the murder occurred is now a solitary (and haunted) edifice in a ravaged neighborhood, occupied–it appears from the prologue–only by a black hound-from-hell that pursues local residents and munches up visiting white-bread frat boys who come to the area to buy drugs. The mansion has been purchased, however, by a multi-racial group of kids from the ritzy suburbs who plan to turn it into a dance club. Before long, though, the purchasers discover Bones’ remains buried in the basement, and when someone is slaughtered (by the dog), the spilled blood somehow magically restores the murdered man’s flesh and sends him off on a spree of his own, systematically slaughtering those who killed him, along with others who get in his way. To complicate matters further, three of the kids who own the building are the children of Jeremiah, the old lieutenant of Bones’ who’d had a hand in his killing–the fellow is now a straightlaced yuppie type–and Bones targets them, too; and one of the locals they get involved with is Pearl (Pam Grier), now the neighboring psychic, whose daughter just happens to attract one of the guys’ eye (and turns out to be Bones’ child). Everything culminates in an orgy of special effects, complete with swarms of maggots, dead people encased in plasticine as though they were something out of “Hellraiser,” a glimpse of hell, whirlwinds, and a whole bunch of other stuff. The entire sequence is a mess–incoherent and ill-explained–but it does end the picture with a bang, which is all the target audience will probably care about.

It’s impossible to judge “Bones” on any rational basis–by such standards it’s a simply atrocious movie. But it’s an atrocious movie whose simultaneously grisly and jokey character will probably attract quite a few viewers and have a long shelf-life in video stores. Some of the attraction will undoubtedly derive from the presence of Dogg–who cuts a sometimes impressive figure, especially after he’s become a sort of ghetto Freddy Krueger, but can’t deliver a line to save his soul–and Grier as his erstwhile lover turned wacko tarot-card reader (eat your heart out, Madame Cleo!) (The other players, on the other hand, are inconsequential, with the younger members of the cast a particularly pallid lot.) But what makes the picture strangely satisfying junk is Dickerson’s jazzy, no-holds-barred approach, the script’s knowing send-up of the genre’s more outrageous conventions, and the slapdash but colorful effects. There may not be much dramatic meat on “Bones,” but it can fit in comfortably among the really guilty pleasures that the end-of- October season can sometimes produce.