Seldom have I seen an audience thrum with such expectation. There we were, waiting for “Wonderland,” the new bio-pic of John Holmes. Down went the lights, up came the titles, and there was the cause of all the fuss: a flood of statistics, informing us that the late Mr. Holmes, as preëminent in the trouser department as his namesake Sherlock had been in the cerebellum, was the leading pornographic star of his time. That time was the nineteen-seventies and the early eighties, when Holmes made more than a thousand films, many of which, regrettably, eluded critical attention; when he performed under the touching sobriquet of Johnny Wadd; and when he is rumored to have slept with fourteen thousand women, though not all on the same evening.

Then came the hammer blow. “Wonderland,” we were told, would be the story not of Holmes’s Parnassian achievements as a love god but of what happened next. Whose bright idea was that? We didn’t have to sit through “Seabiscuit: The Dog-Food Years,” so what’s with the late-period Holmes, seeing that the blue period was such fun? A Hollywood bent on nothing but aftermaths might be a gentler industry—there would be a certain charm in watching “Mr. and Mrs. Victor Laszlo Finish Up the Dishes and Sit Down to a Game of Canasta”—but, by and large, directors should be encouraged to go where the action is.

James Cox, however, the maker of “Wonderland,” has other ideas. And so we are led through a murky and, it must be said, wholly uninvolving saga of substance abuse and related multiple murders. Thanks to the dim light, grainy film stock, and stir-fried editing procedures, my guess as to the guilty parties is as good as yours, but I think it was done by the drug baron’s henchmen with the lead piping in the scuzzy Los Angeles apartment. Where Holmes fits into this farrago is beyond me, but Val Kilmer’s mumbles and strivings in the principal role seem daringly designed to repel all sympathy, although I couldn’t repress a pang of pity for the cocker spaniel that was clearly glued to the top of his head as a memorial to the seventies frizz of Holmes’s prime. The other actors, not to be outdone, compete to deliver their most peculiar performances to date, and why a freaked-out Dylan McDermott and a near-wordless Janeane Garofalo chose to offer their services to this project must remain a secret between themselves and their maker. Compared with the grim and fractious brutality of “Wonderland,” two hours of heaves and splatters from Johnny Wadd would come as an innocent delight.

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