OPENS MAY 7, CERT 18, 104 MINS This is the true story of a multiple slaying at 8763 Wonderland Avenue, LA in 1981. Porn star John Holmes (Val Kilmer) was a coke buddy of the victims and?according to this script?had recently abetted them in an armed raid on dealer Eddie Nash (Eric Bogosian). Nash be...
OPENS MAY 7, CERT 18, 104 MINS
This is the true story of a multiple slaying at 8763 Wonderland Avenue, LA in 1981. Porn star John Holmes (Val Kilmer) was a coke buddy of the victims and?according to this script?had recently abetted them in an armed raid on dealer Eddie Nash (Eric Bogosian). Nash beat a confession out of Holmes, leading to their murders. If this sounds familiar?porn star, coke, guns, disaster?it’s because Boogie Nights also featured a sequence based on these facts. Remember when Mark Wahlberg, Thomas Jane and John Reilly try to rip off a crack-smoking Alfred Molina? That was the Wonderland story, told with more drama and style than director James Cox manages here.
The cast and story are first-rate. The problem is the structure?a series of subjective flashbacks?which allows no time to develop Kilmer’s character. He just seems like a whining, feckless cokehead. And we’ve got enough of those without mythologising one who died in 1988?no matter how well-hung he was.