TV REVIEW : No Thrills, No Chills on ‘13th Floor’

The premise of an innocent protagonist accidentally stumbling across some kind of devilish cult has driven all sorts of creepy films: “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Race With the Devil,” “Harvest Home,” “The Wicker Man,” “All the President’s Men,” et al.

To that frightful list do not by any stretch of imagination add “Nightmare on the 13th Floor,” a pathetically unspooky TV movie airing at 9 tonight on cable’s USA Network.

The idea isn’t a bad one: What if all those hotels that skip from the 12th to the 14th floor, supposedly from superstition, really do have a 13th floor, where bad things happen to good people? This hotel’s 13th floor, however, is the sort of “ooh, scary!” environ where you’d expect to find Count Floyd, not Beelzebub. Hokey Halloween.

Michele Greene (“L.A. Law”)--hitting an absolute career low already--plays a travel-magazine journalist who starts to notice strange things while freeloading in a classic L.A. hotel, like the fact that other guests check in but they don’t check out. Despite a busy lobby, the place seems to have a higher vacancy rate than Stephen King’s Overlook; pursued by sluggish, walk-don’t-run satanists, Greene is able to run around the place for minutes banging on doors without raising a soul.

Greene hits one note: perky. She tries for terrified later on in the proceedings, but never manages to look too worried, despite the rapidly advancing death rate around her. Her performance shines, however, compared to the I-hope-no-one-sees-me-in-this laissez-faire lassitude of Louise Fletcher and the half-asleep hamminess of James Brolin. Poor Brolin is so unthreatening as an ax-wielding physician that he is reduced to whining for Greene to come back and be bludgeoned: “Elaine, Elaine, you can’t do this to me! Your life makes me immortal! Please, I’ll live forever!”

Count your blessings, James. To sit through “Nightmare on the 13th Floor” (which has repeat airings Nov. 4 and 10) is truly to know what it’s like to have lived forever.