Just watched this movie on DVD and thought the acting was very good, but the over all story left a lot to be desired. This movie has the same texture and look of Panic in Needle Park or Drugstore Cowboy. Hard to believe that human beings can live this type of lifestyle; on the underbelly of society, in which their total existence is based on hardcore drug use, crime, violence, sex, and a total lack of self-respect for anyone or anything, including themselves.
Val Kilmore is outstanding in his role of "burnt-out" former porn star John Holmes. The supporting cast is just as good. However, this is a bleak, dark, disturbing, and depressing film. The murder was brutal, but the daily lives of these people were brutal as well. Unless you have an interest in these murders or were a "fan" of John Holmes, this really isn't a film to see. If you want to see a docu-drama on murder, Truman Capote's 1960s In Cold Blood starring Scott Wilson and Robert Blake is much better.

I ended up watching this whole (very long) movie because I was fascinated by the sheer stupidity and naivity of it. It seems difficult to believe that so many famous people (Anthony Quinn, Lawrence Olivier, John Gielguld, Vittorio de Sica, etc.) would have willingly participated in this farce. But maybe in 1968 people really *were* so naive? The plot seems written by some confused Latin American Marxist priest with an agenda. There is a superpower conflict and the Russians are actually the good guys, with the Communist Party General Secretary being a nice and spiritual man, who, suddenly, after 20 years, sees the light and feels compelled to ease his bad conscience by releasing a prisoner priest from a Siberian gulag. The priest then promptly becomes the Pope by a series of coincidences. We are allowed to see the secret Vatican papal voting process which is portrayed in the most hillariously pious form you can possibly imagine.
Meanwhile, the communists in China achieved the usual socialist economic miracle of starving half of their country to death. To solve this minor hiccup on the relentless shining path towards communism they want to start a nuclear war (in order to justly distribute the Western capitalist riches to the poor workers of China).
Our good old comrade General Secretary gets a bit worried and calls the Pope just before his coronation to ask him to broker peace. They meet with the Chinese leader comrade Peng who looks and acts like a 15 year old boy. You will roll on the floor laughing about what people in 1968 thought the Chinese looked like. Comrade Peng demands that the Western capitalists must pay (which is quite logical after all, don't capitalists always have to pay for the madness of the socialists?), and that the Pope needs to sacrifice something, too, for the common altruistic cause of equality and social justice.
So when the Pope gets crowned in Rome, he pledges the entire wealth of the Catholic church world-wide to feed our poor Chinese brethren in Christ. And thus he saves the world from nuclear holocaust.
Apart from this, there are also some minor sub-plots, which, alas, provide little to redeem this incredibly bad movie. I'd give it three Oscars for stupidity.
By the way, Anthony Quinn looks quite unlikely as a Pope. He is much more plausible as Zorba the Greek.