Everything is going rather well for Joanna Darby, an upwardly mobile fashion designer, except that DEAD PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO KILL HER! She'll be walking along the sidewalk and A CAR WILL ROAR UP AND ALMOST MOW HER DOWN! She'll be partying in Mexico when suddenly A MANIAC PULLS HER INTO THE WATER AND TRIES TO DROWN HER REAL GOOD!

And then, perhaps the most cunning, fiendish, blood-chilling nightmare of all, a TEEN-AGE ZOMBIE ON A SKATEBOARD DOES THE WHEELIES OF THE DAMNED in a parking garage! It's at that point she gets really spooked. Considerably earlier, viewers who are supposed to be clutching their cushions in dread may find themselves lost in giggles instead.

"From the Dead of Night," the two-part NBC movie tonight and tomorrow at 9 on Channel 4, dabbles in a provocative subject-the out-of-body experience of a woman who feels as though she died and came back after a blow to the head-but uses it as just an excuse for old-time horror movie hokum.

The bad signs start early, even before the accident, when director Paul Wendkos stoops to a tired fake-out device to inject synthetic tension-ominous, menacing footsteps approach Joanna Darby as she putters around her cavernous loft. Turns out it's just her boyfriend, ha ha. "I didn't mean to scare you," he says after leaping out from the dark.

That same trick is used much later when Joanna is all alone at the health club (something that would never happen in Southern California, where this takes place) and a blond cutie approaches her quietly, furtively, threateningly-one might even say, DIABOLICALLY!

It turns out she just wants to chat.

Transparent as a ghost, "Dead of Night" is semiredeemed by the first-rate performance of versatile Lindsay Wagner as Joanna. Wagner plays a scene in which she succumbs to a sedative with knee-weakening believability. And she's very good in the scariest scene of the picture, wherein Joanna is left alone in a room at the morgue with a "dead" body.

That's a "dead" (IN QUOTES!!!) body.

Of course she should never have stayed alone in the room with a "dead" body when she knows darn well that DEAD PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO KILL HER! Alas, the film is so insufferably padded that its premise isn't even fully stated until Part 2.

It seems that while Joanna was on vacation from her own mortal shell, floating above herself after that severe conking, she entered the land of the dead-no, not cable television-and six dead souls tried to grab her. The dead don't like it when you just drop in for a visit. They want you to put your toes up and stay awhile.

What's never made clear is how the dead people who later try to kill her managed to die themselves. That is, who is killing the dead? Among the lively stiffs are Robert Prosky as a once-friendly doctor and Peter Jackson as the former merrymaker on holiday in Mexico.

Unfortunately, Wagner is saddled with two boyfriends who are among the dullest leading men around: blobby Bruce Boxleitner as a former flame who is a fun-loving free spirit, and leaden Robin Thomas as her current beau, a prune-faced prig. You do wonder what she sees in him, and sees and sees, and why she doesn't happen to notice he is just a hair this side of psychotic.

At least his creepiness is used to good effect in the midnight-hour finale, which borrows a scare tactic from "Wait Until Dark," after having borrowed from "Night of the Living Dead" all along. The producers should also be credited for including a scene in which Joanna considers buying a handgun and, turned off by the sleaziness of the salesman, reconsiders and runs from the shop.

Of course in her case, guns don't kill people. DEAD PEOPLE KILL PEOPLE.