Watchlist: Alan Moore Tries His Hand at an On-Screen Original

Alan Moore has been a big cheese in the comics world for 30 years, going back to his work on “Swamp Thing” and his creation of “V for Vendetta” in the early 1980s. But recently he's been known less for his writing than for his carping: to the moviegoing public, at least, he's the guy who's never happy with the films made from his books. (Of James McTeigue's “V for Vendetta”: “It's a thwarted and frustrated and largely impotent American liberal fantasy.” Of Zack Snyder's “Watchmen”: “The ‘Watchmen' film sounds like more regurgitated worms.”)

Now Mr. McTeigue and Mr. Snyder, along with Stephen Norrington (“The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”) and the Hughes brothers (“From Hell”), have their own chance to sit in judgment. The first film Mr. Moore has written directly for the screen, a 32-minute metaphysical-mystery called “Jimmy' s End,” made its debut Monday on the tech-oriented YouTube channel Motherboard. (The film is the first in a projected series of shorts for Motherboard, which is part of Vice Media, but no further titles have been announced.) It's time for the rest of the world to watch the Watchman.

On the positive side, “Jimmy's End,” which was directed by Mitch Jenkins, has high ambitions for an online original. Mr. Moore's script, which sends a silver-haired, well-dressed burnout named Jimmy (Darrell D'Silva) into a nightmarish underground lounge, is elliptical and high on languid menace. And the music, hypnotic reimaginings of 1950s and ‘60s British pop by Mr. Moore's collaborators Andrew Broder and Adam Drucker, is excellent - it's the real reason to stick with the film.

“Jimmy's End” as a whole doesn't cast the same spell as those songs, however. The midcentury music-hall surrealism, including smeary, victimized women and a spooky vaudeville act called Matchbri ght and Metterton (Robert Goodman and Mr. Moore), is so derivative of Dennis Potter and David Lynch that it's hard to take quite seriously - you keep waiting for the dancing dwarf to pop out. And Mr. Moore's screenplay, meant to be suggestive and scary in a noir sort of way, is mainly just pretentious, simultaneously obscure and heavy-handed. The death metaphors suggested by the title really start to pile up.

A lot of Mr. Moore's comics writing suffers from a similar affectation, but his tremendous storytelling skills can take hold over the course of a graphic novel, and brilliant artists like David Lloyd and Stephen R. Bissette give life and shape to his rhetorical excesses. Mr. Jenkins, a director of music videos, gives the film an attractive sheen but not much else.

Mr. Moore doesn't just write action comics or dystopian thrillers - he has a large body of work that includes erotica and occult mystery as well as short stories and novels. Watching “Jimmy's End ,” though, you can see the wisdom of those benighted filmmakers who have chosen to adapt Mr. Moore's more mainstream works: he's really best at putting intelligent dialogue into the mouths of superheroes.