Starring Snoop Dogg, Pam Grier. Written by Adam Simon, Tim Metcalfe. Directed by Ernest Dickerson. (STC) 93 min. Opens Nov. 9.

Any film that features the sight of Snoop Dogg in full pimp-daddy regalia sweet-talking an Afro-wearing Pam Grier and isn’t the greatest film of all time must rate as a disappointment. And outside of a few promising ideas, Bones — director Ernest Dickerson’s attempt to combine blaxploitation nostalgia, hip-hop rawness and horror — isn’t half as fly as it should be.

The focus of the action in Bones is a dilapidated house that drips blood and eats gang-bangers. The place has been haunted ever since the ignoble demise of its owner, a stylish and benevolent crime boss named Jimmy Bones (Dogg), back in 1979. When Patrick (Khalil Kain) — a clean-cut young man whose dad left the hood for the burbs soon after Bones’ demise — buys the place with plans to convert it into a nightclub, the original gangsta begins a quest for vengeance.

Spike Lee’s former director of photography, Dickerson started off on a socially conscious track with his great 1992 debut, Juice, but he’s spent the majority of his career making trashier fare, some of which is pretty fun (Surviving the Game). In Bones, he makes some satirical jabs about the flight of the black middle class out of inner-city neighbourhoods, leaving them to be ravaged by crack and poverty. Rather than pin it on the Man, the film blames the decline of Bones’ streets on both black and white culprits.

Too bad this intriguing notion ends up in such a clumsy amalgam of High Plains Drifter and Nightmare on Elm Street 4. Serving as part avenging gunslinger, part Freddy Krueger, Snoop has some charisma, but he isn’t up to the task. Grier, who plays Bones’ faithful lady, is no better off. After following up a kick-ass performance in Jackie Brown with time in turkeys like Jawbreaker, Fortress 2, Ghosts of Mars and now Bones, she must wonder why she ever took her Afro out of mothballs.