Earthquake
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Movie Reviews of Earthquake
Movie Review: a classic starring moses
Summary: 5 Stars
a classic i never get tired of watching los angeles crumble..especially since i dont live there anymore ..shake awayMovie Review: This could well happen!
Summary: 5 Stars
Mr. Charlton Heston went all out for this movie. Great movie from a time when all movies were exciting to watch.Movie Review: Can't beat disaster movies for action.
Summary: 5 Stars
Just shows why I don't and won't ever live in California. Who needs this?Movie Review: A New Release of a Fun Diaster Film
Summary: 4 Stars
The following is my review of the original release on DVD, let's hope the new one has some great DVD Extras or the scenes made and inserted for the television premiere:
Guess what, this is a film about Los Angeles being destroyed by an earthquake. The special effects are dated yet they still hold up. The film innovated a system called Surrondsound. It used low level sound waves to shake the theater seats, which was a fun gimmick that worked. When they first broadcast the film on NBC, there was a stereo simulcast that used the Surroundsound and it worked. Too bad they don't have that on the DVD.
Stewart Graff (Charlton Heston) is an ex football player turned structural engineer that is concerned with overbuilding in Los Angeles. He is married to Rene (Ava Gardner) but is having an affair with the widow of a friend, Denise Marshall (Genevieve Bujold). His boss is his father in law, Sam Royce (Lorne Green). George Kennedy plays the hard nosed street cop Lew Slade who is suspended after a high speed chase. The featured cast includes Richard Roundtree as daredevil Miles Quaid, Victoria Principal as Miles manager's sister Rosa, Marjoe Gortner as a store manager obsessed with Rosa and is in the National Guard Reserves, Lloyd Nolan as a doctor and Walter Matthau makes a cameo as drunk.
A young scientist (Geoffrey Duel) accurately predicts a minor earthquake and tells his boss that this could be a precursor to the big one but his supervisors (Barry Nelson and Donald Moffat) don't agree. When the second predicted minor quake happens, the question is what to do.
At the damn, the first quake floods the machinery shaft and drowns a watchman. After the second, a crack is noticed on the damn and the water level is rising.
As the big one hits, everyone is scattered. Denise is walking in the hills, her son is on a bridge over the LA river, Rosa is at a movie, her brother and Miles are at the stunt. Stewart and Rene are outside the office building with her father in the building.
What follows is everyone trying to find their loved ones. Stewart tries to rescue his father in law who is trapped when part of the staircase is destroyed. Denise finds her son on the bed of the LA river with downed electrical wires and approaching water. Slade tries organize survivors. Marjoe lets his activation by the National Guard go to his head. Eventually, most characters wind up at the underground parking lot at Wilson Plaza (actually Arco Towers.)
An aftershock happens, trapping the survivors in the parking lot but the damn burst and threatens to flood the parking lot. In the end, Stewart saves Denise but has to decide to risk his life for his wife.
As in most multiple jeopardy films (better known as disaster films), the star is the disaster. The cast is just decoration. For 1974, this is cutting edge. The filmmakers have never liked earthquakes on previous films. Therefore, they did two things. They built a scale model of downtown LA and Hollywood and the sets were built on springs. This created a realistic destruction of the buildings and the actors did not have to pretend the earthquake, the sets moved under their feet.
Earthquake was not a great film but it is fun. With special effects that run from awesome to cheesy. This is a great Saturday afternoon flick.
Movie Review: L.A. Annihilated From Underneath
Summary: 4 Stars
As most people know by now, most disaster films, especially those that were so spectacularly popular at the box office in the 1970s, are for the most part soap operas or melodramas in which an all-star cast must somehow fight for survival after some outrageous cataclysm, be it natural or man-made.
EARTHQUAKE, released near the end of 1974, isn't any different. There is plenty of melodrama to be had, and a lot of soap opera theatrics to be found, not to mention a lot of dated dialogue and hair styles to go along with all that. In short, it has everything that critics learned to despise about the entire disaster movie genre.
And yet, for those of us living in Southern California, where this film is set, earthquakes and the fear of them are a basic fact of life. And those are the kinds of fears that this 1974 box office smash taps into. Admittedly it's a tough job to ignore the overblown theatrics between Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner, or Marjoe Gortner's psychotic National Guard character. But beyond that, the very likelihood of Los Angeles being hit with a cataclysmic quake, as happens here via Oscar-winning special effects work by Albert Whitlock, Frank Brendel, and Glen Robinson (which, though perhaps dated by today's standards, still work well under the circumstances) and Universal's wall-shaking Sensurround system, is a bit too frightening to sweep under the rug without a second thought. As a result, soap opera theatrics aside, EARTHQUAKE qualifies as a science fiction film much as it does a disaster pic.
There isn't a whole lot that this cast, which includes good people like George Kennedy, Genevieve Bujold, Barry Sullivan, Donald Moffat, and Kip Niven can really do with the overcooked dialogue of the George Fox/Mario Puzo screenplay; and director Mark Robson is also somewhat hog-tied as well. But when the Big One hits, the City of Angels is virtually annihilated from underneath, and the cast must find its way out of the horrible rubble, this is where EARTHQUAKE works.
So what we have is an undeniably flawed "relic" of its time in terms of dialogue, acting, and direction, but a cautionary warning of what can happen to L.A. if Mother Nature decides to roll a 7.0 or higher on the Richter scale.