Wonderland

Writer/director James Cox reconstructs the notorious 1981 quadruple murder in a drug house on L.A.’s Wonderland Drive, for which porn star John Holmes (Val Kilmer) and nightclub owner Eddie Nash (Eric Bogosian) were each tried and acquitted. Because the crime remains officially unsolved, and the key figures told so many different stories, Cox adopts a conflicting, occasionally confusing Rashomon-style approach, giving us the same scene different times from different points of view. The movie has the hopped-up, sickening energy of a four-day drug binge, and it’s as repellently fascinating as a pulp detective magazine. Within Cox’s glare-of-the-floodlights documentary style, performances are excellent: Kilmer as Holmes, Lisa Kudrow as his estranged wife and Dylan McDermott as a dealer who narrowly escaped the massacre.