The Langoliers

Well worth the wait is the 10-or-so-minute action payoff. It's nightmarish despite the obviously superimposed langoliers (created via digital visual effects) that recharge the final minutes of this miniseries, which isn't over when you think it is. [13 May 1995, p.15]

Writer-director Tom Holland has pulled off the viewer-friendliest Stephen King vid adaptation since the Tobe Hooper-Paul Monash "Salem's Lot," at least for the first three hours. Pulling flesh-and-blood characters out of King's stick figures aboard an airplane zooming into a twilight zone, Holland has turned The Langoliers into a TV grabber.

Writer-director Tom Holland, whose films include "Child's Play" and "Fright Night," keeps the tension pulsing and pounding through most of the four-hour freakout. [12 May 1995, p.57]

With The Langoliers, there's a primal zing to the story. The cast also gets into the anxiety-fueled swing of things, especially Pinchot, Stockwell and the eerily enchanting Maberly. [12 May 1995, p.1C]

This makes The Langoliers slow going in spots, but it’s also a lot more fun than most TV movies...Pinchot turns in a wonderfully delirious performance as a grown-up abused child driven to succeed as a banker by memories of his cruel daddy. And even though the langoliers are pretty obviously computer-animated special effects, these little meatballs are still pretty scary. I’d rather watch them than a Susan Lucci TV movie any day.

The Langoliers casts a fitfully eerie spell. At four hours, it's about two hours too long, but there are some punchy payoffs along the way that keep one intrigued, if not exactly scared to the point of hysteria.

The cast, on the whole, creates believable characters in an unbelievable situation. (Pinchot is the exception - too much of his comic persona leaks through and undermines the maniac he's trying to create.)

The Langoliers is a rather bumpy flight for Stephen King, so keep the sick bags ready along with the popcorn. But this new miniseries puts an intriguing spin on that most timeworn of sci-fi plots, time travel - as long as you can stomach character cliches that approach parody, not to mention a grand finale of flying creepies who look like hybrids between Pac-Man and the scrubbing bubbles of Dow Bathroom Cleaner. [13 May 1995, p.21]

What really destroys "The Langoliers," though, is when the langoliers finally appear, looking and acting like a pack of crazed, oversize Pac-Men. Their evil intention is to literally chew the scenery, but Pinchot has already beaten them to it and the special effects are more laughable than terrifying, as if the dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park," after all that buildup, had looked like big Barneys. Until that point, "The Langoliers" is fun but that's not quite enough. If you're curious, though, catch it now, because it's a safe bet this miniseries won't ever be an in-flight movie. [12 May 1995]

The two-part film is dotted with clever tensions and neat touches, not least a drinks trolley eerily rolling down the aisle of the near-empty plane. But the inflated story goes fairly predictable in a hurry, and the underlining is heavyhanded.

This latest King project, though king-size in running time, is considerably less King-ly in terms of its TV content. Indeed, the whole oversize romp winds up an exercise in the overlong, a tale lacking cohesion and solidity, coming across as an overblown "Twilight Zone" robbed of focused staying power. In its video guise, "The Langoliers" is a bloated exercise in "boo" closer to a whimper than full-blast fright show. [10 May 1995]

For a scary movie, this is incredibly banal. In fact, the events surrounding fateful Flight 29 are a crashing bore.

Outside of that brief reprieve, though, it's mainly tedium in the plane's cabin and at a deserted airport in Bangor, Maine. Tedium, and a lot of creaky disaster-movie dialogue.