Motherboard TV: Alan Moore's "Jimmy's End"

Alan Moore’s blood-stained fingerprints are all over the movies—V for Vendetta, Watchmen, From Hell—but the graphic novelist has all but disowned those Hollywood adaptations. If he’s going to do film, he’s doing it his own damned way. Above is “Jimmy’s End,” the first in a surrealist-noir film series by Moore and director Mitch Jenkins, set in Nighthampton, the pitch-dark alternate reality of Moore’s British hometown. Presented by Lex Films and Motherboard, the uncanny, nerve-wringing fever dream follows a haunting prologue, “Act of Faith” (watch it here), both of which will become more interactive over the coming weeks. Here’s the synopsis:

“We’ve all been there: in the lapses after midnight, stumbling down unfamiliar gutters after one too many for the road and looking for inviting lights before they call last orders. James is trying to lose himself, but in a fractured men’s room mirror finds the eyes that have been waiting for him. Following from the unnerving prelude Act of Faith, Alan Moore and Mitch Jenkins unveil a phantasmagoric English dreamtime made of goosefleshed pin-up girls, burned out comedians and faulty lights, with judgement just behind the tinsel Jimmy’s End pulls back the purple drapes upon an intricate new planet of desire and mystery. We’ve all been there.”

“Don’t be nervous,” one of the pin-up girls tells a dazed visitor in a dark corner of the burlesque funhouse, just before the “big night” begins. Good luck with that.

Full screen it in a dark room. And stay tuned for more Moore oddities, and a Motherboard documentary on the making-of “Jimmy’s End.”

And listen to a song commissioned for the film series by Crook & Flail with vocals by Tunde Adebimpe (TVOTR) and lyrics by Moore: