If you don’t know who John Holmes is, he was a dude who had a 13″ long dick. That’s about it. He was one of the first porn superstars, then he was involved in some murders and died of AIDS. This is his story.

WADD is pretty much a standard documentary, lots of talking head interviews, still photos, archival footage. It uses the old format of starting with clips of comments you will hear later in the movie, and wrapping up with each interviewee saying a couple final words about Holmes. The IMDB says that the director did a couple other documentaries, one about the Civil War and one about WWII. This is basically the same thing, only the archival footage generally shows Mr. Holme’s gigantic dick going into various mouths, vaginas, etc. The documentary is put out by a porn company called VCA, and the vhs even comes in a big porn sized box, so they didn’t have to be shy about actually showing what the dude did in his movies.

This falls into the category of the documentaries that are not great pictures in themselves but that are definitely worth seeing just because the topic is so interesting. Obviously his life is a good story – I guess Val Kilmer is supposed to play him in a movie now, and Mark Wahlberg already did a loose adaptation with his character Dirk Diggler in BOOGIE NIGHTS. In that movie, Julianne Moore makes a documentary about Dirk Diggler’s career – this is based on EXHAUSTED which was made about John Holmes by somebody named Julia St. Vincent. Dirk also has his series of movies where he plays a cop, which is based on Holmes’ Johnny Wadd series, and even uses lines taken directly from those movies. Holmes, like Dirk, started out clean but grew a cocaine habit as big as his dick, and then had trouble getting the latter up. And that great scene in the drug dealer’s house with the robbery gone bad, that was based on a notorious incident where Holmes was implicated in 4 murders. (I think they made up the kid with the firecrackers, though.) (more…)

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