Wonderland

Synopsis: John Holmes (Val Kilmer) was the first big-time porn star but by 1981 he was a cocaine-addict scamming whatever drugs however he could, On July 1 1981, four people were murdered in a house on Wonderland Ave. in Los Angeles and Holmes was fingered and arrested.

A relatively small-budgeted walk on the wild side, Wonderland has had the misfortune to be released amongst the pre-Oscar brouhaha for the year’s big films and has slid onto the screen (and will probably slide off) virtually unannounced. Which is a pity, not because this is great film but to the ‘drug/crime’ genre it is a worthy addition.

Although Holmes is best known as a porn star (Mark Wahlberg played a character loosely based on him in Boogie Nights, 1997) this fact-based account of his involvement in a brutal multiple murder has no interest in his sexual exploits except as his freakish appendage enabled him to trawl the Hollywood underworld, a figure of sadistic fascination for its less well-endowed bosses.

The film starts off with a disconcerting barrage of post-production effects and snatches of contemporary pop songs, unpromisingly suggesting that it is shaping up to be a would-be hip exploitation film. After 20 minutes or so however, it locks into its main purpose, which, over and above the relating of the incidents, is to depict a real and brutally self-destructive world that has lost all connection with ‘everyday’ morality. In this it is highly effective, a far cry from the sanitized romances of related ‘drug/crime’ films like Blow (2001) and closer to the darkness-empathising Autofocus (2002), an account of the fall of another sex-obsessed, small-time legend, Bob Crane. Although more violent and kinetic than that film, Wonderland also manages to take on the conundrum of ‘what really happened” with a cleverly-constructed  telling of the events from multiple perspectives.

Whilst I found the portrayal of Holmes’s character sometimes questionable (more mother-dependant puppy dog than chronic liar, thief and pimp), it is clear from the Alan Smithee (aka Cass Paley) documentary about Holmes, Wadd (2001), that Cox has stuck pretty close to the truth of the matter without trying to score any moral points. Val Kilmer was, in any case, probably never going to get too down and dirty with Holmes’s less admirable qualities but he does a good job of portraying a man running with the devil and there are strong smaller roles for the always-excellent Lisa Kudrow as his long-suffering estranged wife and Eric Bogosian as a gangster thug.

Wonderland is no light-hearted, crowd-pleaser but it is a well-made account of the seamy side of La-La Land and the American Dream.

 

 

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