To many, "Wonderland" -- Avenue, that is, up in Laurel Canyon -- will ring a vague bell. Multiple murders, hard drugs or some such, another of those post-Tate/LaBianca bloodbaths that L.A. offers up from time to time, sex and entertainers, too bizarre for the more straightforwardly brutal rest of the country. Director and co-writer with three others (more precisely, co-rewriter of an earlier script) James Cox's Wonderland turns back to that summer twenty-two years ago, to the two-inch pipe bludgeonings that left four dead and another woman critically injured.

When the film begins, just after the fact, things are so obviously amiss, but the deed is not immediately detailed. Thus, what emerges is essentially flashback, without the usual introspective soft-focus intros and artfully and appropriately integrated, often through police interviews that do not call attention to themselves as such.

That terrible acts have taken place in a stylish but not super-wealthy apartment is openly apparent, and spattered blood plentiful, but the puzzle pieces are revealed slowly, and it is not until fairly late on that carnage appears on-screen. Suspects and victims, the quick and the dead, are identified, although, given techniques which mirror drug-addled mental states, characters are slurred, difficult to pinpoint, even as to names.

Raising the case beyond your pedestrian drug-and-party deal gone awry, and tying all together in ways never solved or clarified either in the courts of California or the movie, is the involvement of John C. Holmes, once legendarily endowed king of the burgeoning hard-core porno film industry (and mistakenly said to have been creep Eddie Haskell of Leave It to Beaver).

Cocaine-addicted Holmes has fallen from salad days as "Johnny Wadd," stud of two thousand skin flicks and reputed screen lover of fourteen thousand females. He is also an obvious suspect or at least accessory after the fact, who circulated freely between the circles of the victims small-fry dealers Ron (Josh Lucas) and Susan Launius (Cristina Applegate) and their crowd, and untouchable major nightclub owner and trafficker Eddie "Arab" Nash (Eric Bogosian).

Like his Jim Morrison and Doc Holliday, Val Kilmer's Holmes is improbably sympathetic compared to the rest. Scared, vulnerable, little-boyish, he is the cause of his own destruction but has a charm and conscience of sorts separating him from the amoral nether world in which he wallows. While others may love and be loved in their hedonistic fashion -- "stone killer" motorcyclist David Lind (Dylan McDermott), for example -- the more complex feelings of Holmes's years-younger girlfriend Dawn (Kate Bosworth) and estranged wife Sharon (Lisa Kudrow) would indicate finer qualities in this shell of a man. (Both women, coincidentally, are daughters of military men.)

The actual case remains to this day, and probably for ever, spectacularly unresolved -- only "slightly impaired," the fifth victim recovered but had seen only "shadows," anyway. One might not initially be aware that early exposition here is furnished through characters' eyes and versions -- David's, Dawn's, Holmes's -- and only later realize this as other, overlapping events and versions are recounted. Each contributor has a subjective, emotional interest, so the resulting mosaic cannot claim to be definitive. A page torn from Faulkner or the classic, much less graphic Rashomon.

Not for the fastidious, Wonderland emerges as an effective effort about unpleasant people, even if too many media snippets and moving blue-line street plans are intercalated and unfortunate non-cinematic end-titles hurriedly spell out the fates of these characters. Elsewhere, however, to hard but unobtrusive period pop, the deliberately chaotic film technique admirably reinforces the dual ideas that truth is difficult, at times unknowable, and that the sordid drug subculture and its professed freedom had already crossed a Rubicon into nastiness, violence and death.

(Released by Lions Gate Films and rated "R" for strong violence/grisly images, pervasive drug use, language and  some sexuality/nudity.)