Sit Down for 8 Long Hours of ‘Stand’

It takes patience to survive Stephen King’s occasionally creepy miniseries on ABC.

Some of us love a good scare. And Stephen King has such a well-earned reputation for fright writing that dramatizations of even his less grisly novels raise expectations of exquisite horror. Such is the case with his latest television venture, which starts Sunday.

Be prepared not to be scared, though. Or even to be stimulated. “The Stand” is for viewers with time on their hands. Lots of it. And for viewers with patience. Lots of it.

In an age when a miniseries is usually defined as anything longer than a sound bite, it’s encouraging, in one sense, to see ABC offer the genuine article by spreading eight hours of King across four evenings. Yet “The Stand” is the sprawl that crawls, a wildly tossed salad of mysticism slowly sinking in its own weird juices. Despite its creepshow pretensions, much of it is flat-out dull.

*

King wrote the teleplay based on his own 1978 bestseller, which was reissued in 1990 with more than 500 pages that had been cut from the original. He starts with a bang: An accident at a government lab in California turns lose a super-flu virus that spreads swiftly, killing almost everyone in the United States and turning their bodies into pulpy messes. Sniff or cough, you’re history. So just like that, director Mick Garris strews America with rotting corpses whose heads are oozing, scabby puddings. Not pretty.

The gas-masked military moves in, ruthlessly imposing martial law and carting off some victims of the epidemic to be coldly studied by scientists wearing goofy, poofy, flu-proof lab suits that make them look like big green Barneys.

Amazingly, not everyone is stricken, and exactly why is never explained. The relatively few who are immune have little in common except for having the same puzzling dream while sleeping: A 106-year-old Miss Jane Pittman look-alike named Mother Abagail (Ruby Dee) sits on her creaky front porch in rural Nebraska quoting the Good Book and singing “What a friend we have in Jesus” opposite a cornfield prowled by a stringy haired demon of a man named Randall Flagg (Jamey Sheridan), no relation to Fannie.

It turns out that both the all-seeing, all-knowing Mother Abagail and the nasty Flagg (whose eyes glow in the dark and whose face and voice turn Freddie Kruegerish when he gets teed off) actually exist, and King makes them pointpersons for good and evil, respectively.

The story’s good survivors--played by Gary Sinise, Molly Ringwald, Ossie Davis, Rob Lowe, Bill Fagerbakke, Adam Storke and Ray Walston--converge on Mother Abagail’s house and, later, on a “free zone” in Boulder, Colo. Evil survivors--played by Miguel Ferrer, Matt Frewer, Laura San Giacomo and Corin Nemec--become disciples of Flagg, who uses his thugs, terrorist tactics and evil magic to take over Las Vegas, where he becomes even bigger than Wayne Newton.

As she’s about to check out, meanwhile, Mother Abagail has some heavy advice for her own guys on how to take on Satan: “Be true, stand !” This is meaningful to them, and four of her followers immediately “go forth” from Boulder to confront Flagg and his leather-jacketed lounge lizards.

Inconsistencies abound here. Sinise’s earnest leader and other prominent members of the good camp conveniently have psychic visions only when it serves the script. Otherwise they’re in the dark. And Flagg’s own powers appear to come and go as if his batteries needed recharging. He’s such a stud in bed that he turns his girlfriend’s hair white during just one carnal encounter, yet he can’t stop her from the ultimate betrayal. Having furniture-throwing snits like Bobcat Goldthwait did on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” moreover, he can turn someone he doesn’t like into an electric fizz merely by pointing a finger. On other occasions, though, his wattage appears to dim and he has to have his henchmen do his dirty work for him. And, finally, he seems to know everything his potential foes are doing all the time, only to falter when the plot orders up his comeuppance.

There are times when “The Stand” is enjoyable, most of them related to the dark humor that King invests in the sadistic, grinning, taunting Flagg, who at one point cites the surgeon general’s report regarding the dangers of drinking while pregnant and excuses “those of you with small children” from watching a public execution. Sheridan has fun with Flagg, and is a good physical choice. His face all points, he could almost impale himself on his own chin.

Otherwise, though, “The Stand” is a jagged hodgepodge that rarely makes much sense even when you accept its plot holes, disconnections and scene-by-scene convolution and try to focus on its big picture. Whatever that is.

Twin Peaksian in his clutter, King is like an old-fashioned cook who puts in a pinch of this, a pinch of that. He uses an ever-present crow to symbolize badness. His good survivors come together on their yellow brick road to Nebraska and Colorado like Dorothy and her fellow travelers in “The Wizard of Oz.” He has a love triangle. He has spies and counterspies. He has more male bonding than you get in a beer commercial. He has Lowe’s sensitive character, who can neither hear nor talk, relating to the hulking Fagerbakke’s dullard like George and Lennie in “Of Mice and Men.”

He has just about everyone in here but Siegfried & Roy. He has Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as a babbling, placard-carrying doomsday prophet. He has a bit part for director John Landis, and another for himself as a good survivor.

Meanwhile, you keep waiting for the world to end. More importantly, for this miniseries to end. Afterward, you may still be unclear about what “The Stand” stood for. King has metaphors galore. Flagg could be the Prince of Darkness, Rush Limbaugh or Tom and Roseanne. The lethal flu could be AIDS or drugs.

If you had to identify the most significant message in “The Stand,” though, it would be this: Avoid Los Vegas at all costs.

* “The Stand” airs 9-11 p.m. on Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday on ABC (Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42).