THERE isn’t much meat on “Bones,” a silly, boring supernatural thriller that squanders a potentially interesting premise and the rapper Snoop Dogg in his ostensible starring debut.

He may get top billing and he has undeniable presence, but Snoop Dogg is not much more than glimpsed for nearly an hour into his role as Jimmy Bones, a strutting, benevolent crime boss who’s murdered in 1979 because he refuses to introduce crack cocaine into his ‘hood.

Twenty years later, the young sons of one of Jimmy’s former business associates move into Jimmy’s ruined gothic brownstone and – with the help of their stepsister and a friend – turn it into a nightclub in the course of a single weekend.

They’ve got company: a large, ravenous black dog with red glowing eyes who’s just made quick lunch of a pair of fraternity boys. The canine is the reincarnation of Jimmy, whose bones the youths find in the basement.

That doesn’t stop the opening of the club, which is infested with a plague of maggots as Jimmy prepares to return from the dead to seek revenge on the pals who turned on him.

He’s also seeking a reunion with his ex-girlfriend, a medium (a criminally wasted Pam Grier). She warns the youths – whose father is one of the pals – that “if you stay in this house just one more night, then you might as well be sleeping in your grave.”

Is it a coincidence that the youths’ father (Clifton Powell), who has moved far from the ghetto and taken a white wife, is made up to resemble Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas? Given that director Ernest Dickerson (“Juice”) once helmed a TV movie about Thomas, I’m inclined to doubt it.