Critic Reviews

King wants to scare your pants off while also removing your moral blinders, and he succeeds.

The Stephen King miniseries on ABC have underwhelmed me. I found The Shining tarnished, The Langoliers laughable, The Stand rickety, It exhausting and The Tommyknockers oh so knockable. Storm of the Century, however, wowed me. It is the most effective King miniseries the network has presented. In this genuinely unsettling epic, good and evil face off on a small Maine island pounded by a nor'easter in 1989. [14 Feb 1999]

The film, which begins tomorrow night on ABC, is classic storytelling. It's Stephen King as spellbinder, gathering us around the prime-time campfire -- enthralling, dazzling and scaring our pants off before sending us to bed afraid to turn off the lights. [13 Feb 1999]

As chilling and gripping as any Stephen King film since Stanley Kubrick's classic movie of ''The Shining,'' this six-hour mini-series works the way the most enduring horror tales do, stretching back to Edgar Allan Poe: by blending supernatural events with purely human psychological terror. The first King work written directly for television , Storm of the Century includes knowing echoes of ''The Shining'' and of Shirley Jackson's story ''The Lottery.'' Nervous laughter is also built in, and jumpy viewers can use every bit of it.

It stands as King's best and most effective TV project to date. Best of all is the human dimension of the drama. Where some King minis have built to fantastic payoffs so preposterous as to be laughable, this one uses his bag of tricks and special effects to pose a moral dilemma. The absorbing climax finds its ultimate horror not in a monster, but in the ethical choices of average people. [13 Feb 1999, p.1E]

King scares up a devil of a storm. Stephen King's mission in life is to scare us all to death. And he does a pretty good job of it, too, this week on ABC. [14 Feb 1999]

His sly humor regularly saves his epic battles of good versus evil from being one-dimensional, and "Storm of the Century'' is no exception.

King's first original mini-series script is a marathon of communal anxiety with a spooky moral: we are ready to mortgage our children for our own restless comfort.

King should write for TV more often.

A morality play disguised as horror, this three-part miniseries should win over a few remaining Stephen King holdouts while reinforcing the devotion of legions of fans.