Back in October, when I first saw Snoop Dogg’s demonic yellow eyes staring out at me from the poster at the local multiplex, I thought to myself: This movie deserves the royal treatment on DVD. Surely, Snoop’s ghetto gaze and heavily waxed facial hair would be the focal points of countless making-of featurettes and fawning commentaries. Each shot would be picked apart by film experts, each spliffed-out utterance emanating from Snoop’s pencil-thin mouth would fill the surround-sound speakers in my living room, much like his smoky-smooth verses in “Murder Was Tha Case” continue to do on a thrice-daily basis.

New Line Home Video has answered my prayers. Bones, after becoming the largest-grossing Snoop Dogg/Pam Grier vehicle ever, is now available as a “Platinum Series” DVD, launching the urban horror film smack in the middle of the pantheon of film classics, where it rightly belongs. Because, if DVD has taught us anything, it’s that any awful film can gain credibility with a special edition release.

And Bones sure is awful. The jury’s still out on whether it’s the kind of awful that will earn the film cult status and make it a favorite among stoned college students for years to come, or if it’s just really, basically, deeply awful and should never, ever be rented. Unfortunately, the jury tends to be leaning towards the latter choice, as Bones dooms itself right from the beginning. How, you ask, could a movie so rife with opportunity for hilarity and camp value doom itself?

By being interesting! Yes, Bones isn’t a total wreck. A gorgeous title sequence (thanks in part to the cinematography skills of director Ernest Dickerson, who shot many of Spike Lee’s earlier joints) details – in grainy, memory-stained Super-8 – the degradation of an urban neighborhood over the course of two decades, from jump-roping kids in pigtails to a down-and-out young dude pulling a hit off a crack pipe.

Snoop Dogg is Jimmy Bones, a cross between The Godfather’s Vito Corleone and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song’s Sweetback, a neighborhood protector/numbers-runner/wish-granter in a striped suit with a carefully trimmed mane of straight, shoulder-length hair that waves like a curtain beneath the pimpin’-est hat this side of 1970’s-era Port Authority. Bones is loved in this little corner of Chicago’s notorious South Side – he’s a friend, a business partner, and a role model – he keeps the streets safe and clean and his pockets full.

When Bones refuses to allow crack to infiltrate his neighborhood (this is in 1979, at the birth of a sad, ongoing chapter in urban history), he’s killed in his own home, a sore-thumb Gothic edifice in the middle of an otherwise normal-looking city street, by local pusher Eddie Mack (Ricky Harris) and his partner, Chicago police officer Lupovich (Michael T. Weiss). (The ironic value of Snoop Doggy Dogg refusing drugs is duly noted.) Bones’ friends, present during the killing, do nothing to stop the murder. Twenty-two years later, the neighborhood is a desolate, rough place, and the old Bones home is boarded up. Four kids from an affluent Chicago suburb buy the deed to the house with plans to turn it into a nightclub – little do they know that the spirit of Jimmy Bones haunts the decrepit mansion.

And little does the audience know why. Pam Grier, who plays Bones’ lady-friend Pearl, gives some black-magic mumbo-jumbo reason for why her deceased soul mate has returned from the dead to take revenge on his killers, but it’s never really made clear – other than that Bones is a horror movie, and what would a horror movie be without a resurrected Snoop Dogg vomiting maggots and uttering witty comments before decapitating people? Nothing, that’s what! Dickerson explains in one of the two documentaries included on the disc, that “in American films, there’s always an attempt to make everything logical, to explain every little thing. When really, what’s scary is what’s unexplained.”

Well, if the unexplained is scary, then consider the last two acts of this film the most frightening movie-viewing experience of your life. Snoop comes, he goes, he changes form, he kills, he makes jokes, people run around – irrationality flows like blood, and blood flows like … well, like a whole lot of fake, pinkish blood. The house somehow becomes the City of the Dead, with Snoop as its cackling Pimpmaster, but by that point you’ll be so busy checking your watch that you probably won’t notice.

Extras: from the Rote to the Hilarious

The DVD features two documentaries, “Digging Up Bones” and “Urban Gothic: Bones and Its Influences,” each around 20 minutes long. The former is a by-the-book deal with director and screenwriter interviews, as well as a few choice comments by the Dogg himself, mostly regarding his kissing scenes with Pam Grier. Apparently, the bark is worse than the bite – Dickerson recalls a nervous Snoop blushing before his on-screen smooch. Ah … we can spray bottles of champagne on half-naked bimbos while smoking a blunt the size of the Florida panhandle, but we can’t make out with Foxy Brown. Those cute gangsta rappers.

The latter featurette is one of those unintentionally hilarious forays into self-congratulation that make DVDs so wonderful. The thesis posed by the documentary is that Bones is a modern-day reworking of the Italian horror film, modeled after the movies of Dario Argento and Mario Bava. It’s a nice white lie Dickerson tells to make himself feel better about what is basically a franchise film with only the scantest hints of any sort of history; other than the liberal use of unnatural colors, there’s very little here that’s reminiscent of the 1970s Italian renaissance. Still, that doesn’t stop Dickerson and writer Adam Simon from rambling on about the place Bones has in the canon of horror films, what with its crumbling Gothic architecture and pimp from beyond the grave.

Finally, the feature-length commentary, which includes Messrs. Dickerson, Simon, and Dogg, finds the two filmmakers chatting amicably about the production and Snoop occasionally interjecting random and inane insights that, more often than not, are followed by moments of awkward silence during which Simon and Dickerson wrack their brains to think of some way to respond. It’s hysterical. It just might be worth it to rent the DVD if only to sit and laugh at the commentary.

The disc also contains 14 deleted scenes (with director commentary), two music videos, the theatrical trailer, and an electronic press kit. Sound is available in Dolby Digital EX 5.1 Surround and DTS ES 6.1 Surround. Subtitles and captions are available in English only.