Remember 1994? “Friends,” babydoll dresses and that awful “Stand” miniseries starring Molly Ringwald in the most depressing phase of her career. Speaking of the latter, The Wrap has it on good authority (?) that the author's epic 1978 novel will be adapted by “Fault in Our Stars” director Josh Boone as an eight-part TV miniseries followed by a big-deal theatrical motion picture! I love the book and want this to be good, but I don't know, I just don't.
But back to 1994. “The Stand” aired as a four-part miniseries and racked up an impressive 19 million viewers a night, despite that fact that it wasn't very good. It was directed by Mick Garris, who to my knowledge has never helmed a decent King adaptation, and written by King himself, who has written many good books. Remember all the ways it was bad? Let us count them with the help of IMDB's army of dedicated users.
1. Molly Ringwald as Frannie Goldsmith
“Molly Ringwald's performance as Fran was abysmal. She completely weakened the character into a passive, wooden zombie. I felt more warmth and passion from Tom Cullen's mannequins.” – gymfiend
2. Corin Nemec as Harold Lauder
“Corin Nemec has to be the worst possible choice to play Harold Lauder, who in the novel was an overweight young man with acne, not a skinny goofball with less acting talent than Mariah Carey.” – KubrickCRM114
3. Laura San Giacomo as Nadine
“They picked that no brainer girl to play the Nadine/Lucy character. NOT. Should've been a powerhouse like Faye Dunaway, who would've been perfect – well, maybe a little too old.” – earthprime
4. The casting, overall
“Most of the cast were so lifeless they looked like they had actually died from the plague.” – MartianOctocretr5
5. The music
“I felt like hurling many times in this film. Maybe it was the horrific background music.” – chanel227
6. The costumes
“Why did Frannie wear dresses and skirts across the country on a motorcycle? I don't do this for a living, but I could have done costuming better.” – Mel P
7. The directing
“It was like the director had just graduated from high school.” – jneiberger
8. The blind patriotism?
“…now I know that the sell out writer Mr. King, of course, that lucky product of merchandising, the best ever in the writting industry, just don't have any sense of literacy but an insatiable need to sell his stories with Americana stuff that all the redneks (and wannabe rednecks) like. This movie is just not for everybody, you have to have tears on your eyes when you see the american flag to like this movie… and these tears should not be shed for the victims of american interventionism.” – E n d e r
9. The dialogue
“…the actors are forced too say badly written cliches like, 'I'll see you in hell, Randall, holding your baby in my arms.'” – Sant Jordi
“I was annoyed with the four times they had Ruby Dee claim that they had to make “a STAND”.” – lxoconner
10. The special effects
“Then there is the overuse of horrible computer generated effects. Granted using computer effects was still in rather early terms back then, but if it looks like crap do not do it.” – Aaron1375
11. The sex scenes
“I think I lost my ability to stomach it while watching a truly gut churning scene of adolescent foreplay between Corin Nemec and Laura San Giacomo that convinced me that the director must have never actually had sex.” – remittancegirl
12. The source material
“Stephen King has to be the most boring writer currently on the face of the earth. I mean, he has put out some of the worst pieces of horror fiction ever written. His fame and success are a total mystery to me. Watching The Stand mini-series has reconfirmed my opinion of him and his work.” – nihilistic
13. The boring-ness
“When I saw the beginning I thought “cool, I like catastrophic movies about anything, not excepting hardcore diseases”, but the problem was, that nothing happened in the first part except millions of people perished.” – meldik
“This movie would be real good to watch if you were an insomniac because you would never have problems falling asleep again.” – zove-davidb
14. Literally everything
“The only reason I struggled through the whole thing was that I had absolutely nothing else to do.” – thorn1-1