'WONDERLAND' GOES TO GREAT LENGTHS TO RECOUNT MURDERS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

VAL KILMER, apparently, intends to play strung-out SoCal drug casualties until he gets it absolutely, flawlessly right. ``Wonderland'' contains his latest and best attempt yet to express the humanity within the wired scuzzball, begun with his Jim Morrison impersonation in Oliver Stone's ``The Doors'' and pushed further a couple of years ago in the desert noir ``Salton Sea.''

The best thing about the movie is Kilmer's charming, manipulative and utterly despicable interpretation of the legendarily endowed John Holmes, well past his porn-star prime and too blitzed to do much more than sponge off dangerous dealers and lie to his adoring teenage girlfriend. But it is not the only interesting aspect of this multiple-perspective, ``Rashomon''-like look at the bloody, 1981 Wonderland Avenue murders in Laurel Canyon. Generally terrific performances all around - from unusual suspects such as the often-bland Kate Bosworth, Dylan McDermott and Josh Lucas - contribute to as dense and complicated a picture of under-Hollywood corruption and self-destruction as anything James Ellroy has ever hallucinated.

Working against the piece, however, is its relentless brutishness - not inappropriate for the subject matter, but hard to take in such a long dosage. And director James Cox, while good at separating a variety of different, bent and highly self-serving narrative voices, is one of those show-offish types who has to rub our noses in all of the breakneck camera work, image washing and serrated cutting he can justify, and then more of it.

But, of course, excess is the point of the whole project. Unable to satisfy anyone but the young and infatuated Dawn Schiller (Bosworth), the erstwhile Johnny Wadd had taken to supporting his habit by mooching around such unsavory figures as Palestinian nightclub kingpin Eddie Nash (Eric Bogosian) and the Wonderland party house residents, a bunch of very scary bikers and ex-cons that includes David Lind (McDermott, all hairy and tatted to the point of unrecognizability), the volatile Ron Launius (Lucas) and the rattishly unnerving Billy Deverell (Tim Blake Nelson).

There is a home invasion robbery, which triggered the revenge massacre. But who actually committed the homicides? And how up to his eyeballs was Holmes in both crimes?

Conflicting stories are told, and the obfuscations of the lying liars who tell them become an increasingly sly source of movie amusement. But whether or not the film sheds any real light on what happened 22 years ago is a big question. Schiller, who is now writing a memoir of her time with Holmes, and his widow Sharon (played by Lisa Kudrow in her unforgivingly judgmental gear), were consultants on the movie, and who knows how their influence affected its objectivity.

One thing the women did obviously inform, however, is an unusual depiction of a highly dysfunctional yet nevertheless affectionate family. Though Sharon froze out Holmes when he started making porn films, she never divorced him, and treated his young lover with genuine motherly concern and fondness. And Holmes, who was eventually acquitted of murder-connected charges and died of AIDS complications in 1988, could not possibly have come off as beguilingly as Kilmer portrays him without some input from the two people who loved him despite character flaws mammoth enough to make his one, widely documented personal attribute look teensy by comparison.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

WONDERLAND - Three stars

(R: violence, sex, nudity, drug use, language)

Starring: Val Kilmer, Kate Bosworth, Lisa Kudrow, Dylan McDermott, Josh Lucas, Tim Blake Nelson, Eric Bogosian, Ted Levine, Frankie G.

Director: James Cox.

Running time: 1 hr. 44 min.

Playing: ArcLight, Hollywood; The Grove, Farmers Market; Monica, Santa Monica.

In a nutshell: Wired, well-acted and thoroughly scuzzy look at the Wonderland Avenue multiple murders case, told from multiple unreliable viewpoints, the main one being that of former porn star John Holmes.

CAPTION(S):

photo

Photo:

Kate Bosworth plays the girlfriend of adult-film star John Holmes (Val Kilmer) in the brutal, intense ``Wonderland.''