Photo Gallery
Case in point: On the old GoodTimes (insert ironic crack here) DVD case for Earthquake, a blurb quotes legendary film critic Pauline Kael as saying that 'the picture is swell.' But what she actually wrote in her review was 'the picture is swill.' Amazing was a typo can do for you! So powerful is the cynicism of the film's original creators that its tone of moral bankruptcy has spread itself across three decades to infect even the lowliest of DVD packaging.
Earthquake depicts, in cumbersome and clichéd plotting, a horrific earthquake imploding in the heart of Los Angeles. The film is so awash in self-loathing and contempt you can feel the glee of the Hollywood hacks as they ritualistically destroy their industrial dystopia and all the aging self-serving movie stars who populate it. The names in the cast read like the passenger list on the Love Boat from Hell -- Ava Gardner, George Kennedy, Lorne Greene, Richard Roundtree, Marjoe Gortner, Barry Sullivan, Lloyd Nolan, Victoria Principal, Genevieve Bujold, Gabriel Dell, and Charlton Heston (raked over the coals here a good 29 years before Michael Moore got ahold of him) -- and all are given ignominious send-offs. Heston and Gardner are washed away in the sewer, Roundtree is left alone on a motorcycle to outrace a tidal wave, and Nolan blithely dispatches Greene with a 'He's gone' and quickly covers Greene's face with a sheet.
The big gimmick of Earthquake when it was unleashed upon the world in 1974 was the theatrical audio sensation of Sensurround -- when the earthquake kicked in, the movie theater seats shook and the audio rumble made movie patrons feel as if they were experiencing a group spinal tap. Early DVD releases of Earthquake featured an audio track that mixed down the Sensurround thunder, leaving the hellhole scenes of carnage barren, the simple sound effects of screaming, crying, and hollering adding an extra layer of insensitivity to the proceedings.
But now, watching it in the privacy of your own media room with an ear-bleeding sound system, you can rock & roll as the debris falls down the mise-en-scene, and the primal rush you get is better than a one-minute roller coaster ride straight down. Given all the criticisms mentioned, the film is still swill but the whirligig effects turn the film into swell swill.
Earthquake is the disaster film at its most minimal with no pretense of moral uplift; there ain't no Fred Astaire or tributes to firefighters in this one. Just good, dirty mayhem.
Whole lotta Scotch drinkin' goin' on.
