There is a rightness in the starring debut of rapper Snoop Dogg being in a film called “Bones.” Maybe the sequel can be “Snooper Scooper.”

Mr. Dogg — only New York Times formality can suit his achievement here — stars as mythic bad-vibes pimp Jimmy Bones. His signature rap tune opens with, This is the story of Jimmy Bones / Black as night and hard as stone.

He is murdered in his pimp castle on a baaaad night back in ’79. His “fox” Pearl (Pam Grier, no less) and his favorite, sniveling stooge are forced to jam in the decisive blade after Bones has taken six or seven hot rounds. It’s the 99-cent, trick-or-treat version of “Julius Caesar.”

Of course, his “crib” becomes haunted, prowled by a devil dog who likes eating the bodies of idiotic suburban kids. They come to the slum for drug deals, posting their death no-tices with such lines as, “Dude, let’s get out of here!” It’s too late, because the special effects close-down options, with walls turning into mudslides of squirming corpses in a cheap imitation of Rodin’s “Gates of Hell” (other walls appear made of garbage bags).

I may be wrong — it is easy to mistake details at these depths — but I think Bones starts reviving as more than bones in the basement, ’round about the time that the devil dog devours a heap of ground beef.

This comes soon after a silly white chick, who came to help turn the old dump into a hip-hop dance club, looks at the canine’s burning red eyes and says, “Hey, doggie, hold my burger?” Later, the dog itself growls that he “don’t eat no fried chicken!”

So much for the dog, what of Mr. Dogg? The spieler of the hot album “Doggystyle” is no Tupac Shakur, though his deadly stare goes well with blaxploiter pimp suits. But then Shakur, the late, best hope for a valid rap invasion of film by a truly charismatic star, never had to contend with a monsoon of maggots or bleeding pool tables.

Nor with Pam Grier wearing a do of dreadlocks that rivals Samuel L. Jackson’s in “The Caveman’s Valentine.” Pam, you made your quality comeback with “Jackie Brown.” No wig can hide your agony here.

The film’s fertile matrix was admirably stated by scripter Tim Metcalfe: “We learned that in addition to horror, Snoop loves Clint Eastwood’s work and was also interested in doing a Western. The two genres coalesced into a form where in the first half of the movie Snoop is the ghost in a classic haunted house story, and in the second he is more like the Clint Eastwood character seeking retribution.”

Well, there you have it. The Western element is fairly hard to find, though Bones’ pimp outfit finally favors a sort of full-drape, leather posse gear that seems closer to Lee Van Cleef than Eastwood (the quality level of the whole show is van Cleefian circa ’71). As for director Ernest Dickerson, noted former cinematographer, he maintains the gusto of his past B-zoners such as “Surviving the Game” and “Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight.”

There is howler amusement here, though blaxploitative horror spoofed with so dense a pile-on loses force. You can beat certain genres to death for only so long, then they’re just dead. The current film “From Hell” shows that pompously, “Bones” does it ludicrously.