The irony of “Wonderland’s” title is deliberate. It is the story of a brutal 1981 Los Angeles quadruple homicide in which the late porn-giant John Holmes was implicated. The title refers to Wonderland Avenue, the street where the murders took place, but also sarcastically describes the fantasy world of drugs and porn at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic.
The film is advertised as the story of John Holmes, which it is not. It tries to be about the crime and the attempts of police to determine exactly what happened. That a celebrity (of sorts) was involved is somewhat incidental. It becomes a distraction.
Val Kilmer is interesting as Holmes. He plays much of the film in a drug haze, which becomes too reminiscent of his portrayal of Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors.” It doesn’t help that he looks more like the attractive Morrison and less like the homely “Johnny Wadd.”
Late in the film Kilmer’s character develops a cunning complexity alluded to only early on. He is a messed up byproduct of his culture, but he still has an agenda of his own.
The darkness of the film illustrates the slow death of the Hippy era. The characters in the film — from Holmes to the slimy club owner played by Eric Bogosian (“Deconstructing Harry”) to the various low-life, gun-toting drug-abusers with whom they associate — inherited the sex, drugs, and rock and roll without the peace and love components. They are an unpleasant lot.
James Cox directs his first major release with hints of subtlety. It has the grainy look of pre-video porn and attempts to produce drugged-out visuals early on to draw the audience into the numbed universe of its characters. This is successful to a degree, and Cox wisely drops the excess effects once the mood is established.
Thereafter, “Wonderland” teeters between crime story and docu-drama, featuring subjective flashback views of the events surrounding the murders. The drawback is the movie’s pretense, selling itself as a John Holmes biography. It paints him in an intriguingly convoluted light, but it is not his story, and Kilmer’s portrayal earns more contempt than sympathy.
In part, the film plays like a fact-based “Boogie Nights,” showing the dark underbelly of the porn industry’s heyday in the seventies and eighties. It is therefore inherently redundant.
It is no accident that the women in “Wonderland” are secondary characters but also archetypal. Whereas the men are almost unanimously loathsome, the women are mostly sympathetic subordinates. Kate Bosworth (“Blue Crush”) shows range in a very narrow role as Holmes’s young, conflicted girlfriend. Her misery is palpable as she contends with her deep feelings for a man who, at heart, only cares for himself. Conversely, Lisa demonstrates the strength of a woman who has learned the hard way that John Homes was not good husband material. It is an impressive dramatic performance by an actress better known for comedy.
Where the movie falls short is focus. It is not about Homes; it is not about the crime; it is not about its female archetypes. It suggests all these subjects, but does not fully explore any of them. It therefore feels abbreviated and unfulfilling. It may be that the lack of genuine feeling is the film’s point, but it makes it more difficult to care about the outcome.

Grade: B