Noah's Ark

A title card at the start of Noah's Ark states, ''For dramatic effect, we have taken poetic license with some of the events of the mighty epic of Noah and the Flood.'' I'll say: Since the ''mighty epic'' is a scant few pages in the Bible, the four-hour Noah's Ark, featuring Jon Voight in the title role (as Noah, not the ark), makes a hash of the Book of Genesis. Writer Peter Barnes is not content with merely dramatizing the 40-day flood that prompts Noah to build his big boat and fill it with his wife (Mary Steenburgen), his three sons, their wives, and two of every creature. He also crams in things like the story of a scruffy Lot played by F. Murray Abraham and his wife (Carol Kane), the latter portrayed as a nattering harpy (''You never let me do anything I want — I never have any fun,'' she whines) who can't turn into a pillar of salt too soon, for my taste.

By the second night, Noah's Ark becomes a kind of low-falutin Waterworld, with Noah and his stalwart band of tarantulas, tigers, penguins, and skunks doing high-seas battle with marauding survivors of the destroyed, corrupt Sodom. Really, the production is an elaborate mess. Executive producer Robert Halmi Sr., who's done good (Gulliver's Travels, Merlin) and bad (The Odyssey) in crankin' out the classics for NBC, goes gonzo on this one. At one point, James Coburn, playing a wily peddler — you remember the Bible's Wily Peddler, don't you? — says it all: ''Don't meddle with religion; it doesn't pay.'' D