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.

C

It’s certainly refreshing to see a love story on the screen that involves a man and woman over the age of twenty-five. To be sure, a guy like Warren Beatty, who’s obviously getting on in years, occasionally shows up in romantic roles, but very few others of like age do. On those grounds alone, people may well welcome Australian Paul Cox’s new film: “Innocence” is a discreet, restrained portrait of an affair between Andreas Borg (Charles Tingwell), a widower and retired organist, an Claire (Julia Blake), the wife for forty-five years of John (Terry Norris), a man who’s affectionate enough but has come to take her decidedly for granted (and who, it’s clear, hasn’t always been entirely faithful). Andreas and Claire had enjoyed a passionate relationship as youngsters some five decades earlier, and now he contacts her. Before long they’ve rekindled their love, and Claire is torn between her feeling for Andeas and loyalty to John, who’s unable to understand her turmoil.

All of this is different enough from the usual run of scripts to warrant more than passing interest, and it would be nice to say that the execution was equal to the idea. Unhappily, it isn’t. “Innocence” is slow, talky, and, in its final act, more than a little maudlin; is rather like a decorous soap opera, which seems a contradiction in terms. The dialogue is arch and cliched more often than not, with Andreas in particular given to verbiage that’s apparently meant to be profound but comes across more like simple-minded commonplaces; and the fact that it’s all delivered in clipped Australian accents curiously makes it sound all the more artificial–the whole stiff-upper-lip atmosphere eventually becomes almost comical. To make matters worse, Cox cuts periodically to shots of the young Andreas and Claire gamboling about in fields and organ lofts; one supposes these are intended to have a nostalgic glow, but they possess little or no resonance, and eventually grow intrusive. In the third act, moreover, “Innocence” slips into disease-of-the-week territory, although in a fashion different from what one might at first expect. That strongly resembles afternoon TV drama, too.

As the oldsters rekindling their affection for one another, Tingwell and Blake do a fair job, apart from an occasional stilted or awkward moment and Cox’s penchant for overly long takes–understandable given some of the writing they have to contend with. Norris is good as well; it isn’t his fault that he looks very much like the late Edward Everett Horton, a fact that militates against our taking the character completely seriously. No one else in the cast is around long enough to make much of an impression.

In one of the more revealing and, as it turns out, accurate moments of ham-fisted reverie in “Innocence,” Andreas sagely observes to his daughter, “Do you know what’s really importantly in life? Love.” Then he adds: “Everything else is just rubbish.” Including this movie.