UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Lidia Draper Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

paulclaassen I really enjoyed the practical effects before CGI took over the film industry. This is the time when making disaster films was a huge challenge. This is decent film making at its best. The visual effects are incredible and is still good by today's standard. This must have been amazing at the time of release. Charlton Heston is a likable hero as usual. I enjoyed how the characters interacted with one another and how their characters developed during and after the disaster. The film did end rather abruptly, but it was an enjoyable action drama.

BA_Harrison Made long before the advent of CGI, disaster movie Earthquake relies on a combination of full-scale chaos, clever miniatures, green-screen work and matte paintings to convince the viewers that Los Angeles is being torn apart by the force of nature. And it works brilliantly, the damage caused by the film's devastating quake (and the subsequent aftershocks) just as impressive as many a modern day disaster flick.The drawn out drama might drag the film down a bit, making it slightly less successful than those benchmark classics of the genre, The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure, but Earthquake is still essential viewing for fans of cinematic catastrophe, with collapsing buildings, raging fires, a burst dam, and plenty of extras meeting grisly fates making for a whole lot of fun (who can forget that elevator crashing to the ground with a comical red splat?).Of course, the all-star cast doesn't hurt either: Charlton Heston ably plays the hero, engineer Graff, whose life intertwines with numerous other characters during the course of the movie, including his estranged wife Remy (Ava Gardner), single mum Denise (Geneviève Bujold), tough cop Slade (George Kennedy), stunt motorcyclist Miles (Richard Roundtree), Graff's boss Royce (Lorne Green), and sexy babe with a ridiculously massive fro, Rosa (Victoria Principal). Smaller, but no less important parts are played by Marjoe Gortner as a psychotic national guardsman, and Monica Lewis as Royce's secretary Barbara.All that and a rather downbeat ending to boot! 8/10

virek213 For much of the 1970s, the disaster film genre was alternately one of the most popular genres with film audiences, and one of the most reviled in terms of what movie critics thought. Essentially, it involved a whole lot of people caught up in some kind of cataclysmic event, be it natural or man-made, sometimes, as in the case of the AIRPORT movies, involving passenger planes. Indeed, both AIRPORT (released in early 1970), and THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (released at the end of 1972) were the starting point for the genre, which relied on a combination of soap opera plots, big-name stars, and incredibly spectacular special effects. the peak of this genre came near the end of 1974 with the release of three films. AIRPORT 1975 and THE TOWERING INFERNO were two of them. The third one was EARTHQUAKE.Though every bit as melodramatic in terms of acting and subplots as other films in the genre, EARTHQUAKE also posits a highly realistic premise: that in the very near future, a major earthquake will strike Southern California and cause incredible damage, destruction, and death. It also speculates on the possibility of predicting where and when one will hit. In essence, this means that EARTHQUAKE would also qualify itself as being a science fiction film of sorts for that very reason alone. Charlton Heston portrays an architect intent, when he isn't fighting with his wife (Ava Gardner) or dallying around with a younger girl (Genevieve Bujold), on ensuring that any future high rises in Los Angeles not only meet but also exceed current building codes (as he points out, in the 1971 Sylmar quake, buildings that merely met the codes collapsed). George Kennedy portrays a toughened L.A. cop forced to spring into action when the massive temblor and its aftershocks tear through the heart of Los Angeles. Barry Sullivan, Kip Niven, and Donald Moffatt portray seismologists who have the information in their hands about the possibility of such an earthquake but who act upon it only after one of their colleagues is killed in a mysterious accident along a fault line near Fresno. As night falls on a metropolis devastated by the 8.3 temblor, a lot of other things happen: Kennedy has to rescue a close friend (Victoria Principal) from a deranged National Guard officer (Marjoe Gortner); people have to be rescued from an underground parking garage that has been severely damaged by an aftershock; and people have to be rescued from a collapsed shopping mall by Heston and Kennedy before the Hollywood Reservoir Dam crumbles.By the standards of 21st century special effects, EARTHQUAKE looks admittedly very dated; the matte paintings and the scenes of destruction are all two to three generations removed from today's CGI. And of course the soap opera plotting isn't exactly a plus; some of it veers close to laughable on a few occasions. There's really not much that either the cast of director Mark Robson (VALLEY OF THE DOLLS; PEYTON PLACE) can do about it. But the ten-minute sequence of the "Big One" is quite scary, and was even more so when the film was released in late 1974 because of the Sensurround sound process that Universal used to enhance the feel of being in the middle of it all. Not only did it scare a lot of moviegoers, but it also caused some slight (but actual) exterior damage to the theaters that showed the film. And however dated the special effects are, they are still fairly convincing; this, it is no wonder that EARTHQUAKE won Oscars for both Special Effects and Sound. At a cost of $13 million, much of it spent on the special effects and production design, it wasn't exactly the cheapest film in the world (already the average cost of a film was nearing $7 million), but it managed to gross around $80 million, at a time when the notion of a $100 million box office hit (or a film that cost $100 million just to make) was still something unknown in the movie business.Although, like a lot of 1970s disaster films, EARTHQUAKE largely faded from memory once the genre wore out its welcome at the end of the decade, later sci-fi and disaster films like DEEP IMPACT and "2012", just to name a few, helped revitalize the genre with the use of CGI. Gradually, however flawed it looked by the time those films came out at the end of the 1990s and the first decade of the new century, EARTHQUAKE assumed a greater prominence once again. It is no secret as to why that should be the case, what with a big host of stars, including Heston, who was at another commercial peak in his career in what he termed a "multi-jeopardy" film, leading the way. But the underlying theme of EARTHQUAKE is what keeps the film alive in our consciences: the very real possibility that Los Angeles may well be wiped off the map, if not by the dreaded San Andreas Fault, then by the myriad fault lines that crisscross the Los Angeles metro area itself, some that even seismologists don't yet know much about.

mark.waltz The heat and fault-lines of Los Angeles have made the city jokingly referred to as "Shake and Bake", and with a 1971 quake in recent memory, this Irwin Allen disaster epic (right on the trail of "The Poseidon Adventure") was definite box office magic. An all-star cast was assembled to take what little drama was there and make it more interesting, sort of a "Grand Hotel" weighed on the Richter scale. A few laughs (both intentional and unintentional) have made this a cult favorite with definite elements of camp giving it an almost midnight movie status.A romantic triangle (between husband and wife Charleton Heston and Ava Gardner and his mistress, Genevieve Bujold) is the foundation on which the story is created. Fortunately, that foundation wasn't used for the buildings in downtown L.A., otherwise they might have collapsed a lot faster. There's also a very young Victoria Principal as a troubled young lady who is the victim of an obsessive neighbor (the creepy Marjoe Gortner) and motorcycle stunt artist Richard Roundtree, and of course, that bar room drunk (Walter Matthau) who is too tipsy to notice the reason he can't swallow his shot is because the ground around him is shaking more than his alcoholic hands.Laughs come frequent here, not only with the unbilled Matthau (given credit under his real name to create a surprise cameo) but with Principal's very big afro and daddy's girl Gardner spouting insults at estranged husband Heston while papa Lorne Greene makes business deals as the earth collapses around him. There's the famous shot of a truck full of cows flying off a freeway overpass (the audience actually mooed when I saw this in a revival house) and several L.A. landmarks collapsing. It is just too bad that there has to be the soap opera set-up long before the shaking starts and that makes the film a slight bore.At the West Hollywood video store that I worked at, this film was checked out for weeks after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, as were other films like "San Francisco", "The Rains Came" and "Green Dolphin Street". L.A. residents needed some fictional shaking going on after that scary event which woke us up at 4:30 in the morning. "It's really a little sick", one of our clerks told a local newspaper who called us up to find out if the real quake had an influence on our customers' video habits. Sick or not, real life disasters sometimes call upon our adrenaline and desire to find enjoyment after those scary moments have passed.L.A. audiences too found it humorous to see the Beverly Center blown up after a volcano appeared at the La Brea tar-pits and exploded in the movie "Volcano". I had no idea that the theater I was going to where the movie was playing would end up being a part of the plot and joined in the audience by applauding when that sequence took place. "Earthquake" leaves the same sort of feeling, providing laughs of irony that still amuse us today.