Everyone knows that Boogie Nights was loosely based of the life of John Holmes, right? That was the justification for putting the let-down last quarter in. The heist gone wrong section of Dirk Diggler’s life seemed out of place in the otherwise excellent Boogie Nights. Expanded on, with the real names put back in, it remains a pretty nasty tale and one which as Wonderland has now become a feature length version of the worst bit of Boogie Nights.
When a film starts with text to describe who the lead character is and why we should care, its a sure fire bet that we are not going to care. When a film finishes with seven ‘what happened next’ pages of text you wonder if it even knew what its job was in the first case. The mystery in Wonderland is simple. Was John Holmes involved in the Wonderland murders? The answer is, it does not really matter – why not arrest the guys who DID the murder. Holmes is presented as a needy, whiny loser, or at least played by Val Kilmer so that is the effect we get, so we certainly do not care about him. Instead we are offered his young girlfriend as a heroine, which fails when she falls for his charms (and one assumes his 13″ penis) over and over again. The innocent(-ish) victims in the murder are never presented as characters, only the drug dealing thieves are given any sort of character. Which leads you not to care.
Instead you watch to hear another early seventies soft rock classic, somewhat out of place in a film set in 1981, though not as much as Girls On Film is. And you watch Val Kilmer: a man who is certainly good at playing a big cock – its just the rest of his body that does not convince.