Some actors pass into immortality for their charm, comic ability, good looks, quick wit or related qualities – but Holmes’ place in celluloid history is entirely attributable to his gigantic 15-inch dick, which was subjected to incessant hardcore action over a prolific career spanning some 2,500 movies. Holmes’ body of work, if you will, was groundbreaking only in the sense that he appeared in short 10-minute movies called ‘loops’ (in the innocent pre-video days), which would run their course and then begin again. These enabled pornos to be shown in private booths without the need for a projectionist’s presence (a revolutionary development – given the purpose of such booths, their patrons tended to appreciate the added privacy).
Sadly but predictably, Holmes’ life spun off in several horrible directions, with cocaine and heroin addiction almost the least of his problems after a few armed robberies and several brushes with the law, and his life in general was so luridly eventful it’s hardly a huge surprise to see it given the movie makeover, with the almost-forgotten Val Kilmer putting in the performance of his lifetime (that Jim Morrison turn included) as our horny hero. The director (a Mr. Cox, needless to say) wisely overlooks Holmes’ early years, and concentrates almost entirely on his later, desperate, drug-addicted existence on the edge of LA’s Hollywood Hills scuzz underworld, which culminated in his arrest in the immediate aftermath of four grisly murders on Wonderland Avenue in July 1981.
Uniformly unsavoury, the overlapping characters include a bunch of like-minded psychos (Josh Lucas, Dylan McDermott, Tim Blake-Nelson), ultra-imposing nightclub owner Eddie Nash (Eric Bogosian), Holmes’ embittered first wife (Lisa Kudrow) and his naïve teenage lover (Kate Bosworth). You wouldn’t touch any of them with a bargepole, but their seedy misadventures provide undeniably brilliant source material for Wonderland’s apocalyptic, almost Old Testament-like parable of greed and overkill. In a cruelly ironic twist of fate, it was the man’s phenomenal prick which torpedoed him in the end: John Holmes died in 1988, from AIDS.