“Riding the Bullet” feels very much like something based on a 30-page e-book that novelist Stephen King whipped up after suffering a near fatal car accident. It’s gloomy and under- plotted. It involves death and reckoning. And, most tellingly, it features several gratuitous scenes of pedestrians and animals getting creamed or almost creamed by passing cars.

As they say, write what you know.

To be fair, most of the writing was done — shoddily — by frequent King collaborator and mini-series maestro Mick Garris (TV’s “The Shining”). Set in 1969, “Bullet” tells the story of Alan Parker (Jonathan Jackson of “Tuck Everlasting”), a death-obsessed University of Maine art student who hitchhikes home Halloween night to be with his mother (“Beaches” babe Barbara Hershey), who has just suffered a stroke. Or a bad facelift, if Hershey’s strange, stretchy appearance is any indication.

Early on, writer/director Garris reveals himself as something less than a stickler for detail when one of the characters casually drops a Cheech and Chong reference — this a full decade before the notorious pot-toking jesters released their first movie. Garris’ numb touch doesn’t end there; aside from Jackson’s greasy locks and wispy fu manchu, nothing about “Riding the Bullet” even begins to capture the grunginess and revolutionary essence of the late ’60s.

On the other hand, there’s quite a bit of pot-smoking going on — suggesting that many of Alan’s bizarre encounters on the highway are hallucinatory in nature. He gets chased by rednecks, mauled by wolves and has endless flashbacks relating to his dead father and that time at the amusement park when he chickened out at riding the big rollercoaster, dubbed “the Bullet.”

Finally, he hitches a ride with a chain-smoking greaser (David Arquette) in a red muscle car who gives Alan an ultimatum he can’t refuse. “Fun is fun and done is done,” the greaser says, coining another of King’s baffling podunk catch phrases.

The biggest problem with “Riding the Bullet” is one of compression. Garris’ sense of pace is off; the movie moseys by at a miniseries clip, as if we had four more hours on Saturday and Sunday night to finish the fable. At the same time, there's very little meat to the story, aside the roadkill that Alan stumbles across during his journey.

As an episode of “Outer Limits,” it might have had promise, but as a feature-length movie, it must be consigned to the bottom of the King filmography. In this case, done is fun.