Review of Earthquake (1974) by Christian D — 22 Jun 2010

I'm usually a huge fan of campy all-star disaster films because as ridiculous and cheesy as they may get, they do deliver a lot of entertaining spectacle and are rarely ever boring; unfortunately, "Earthquake" is a disaster flick that takes nearly an hour to deliver the actual earthquake and that portion of the film is pretty dull.

It would be one thing if the film was using this time to effectively build suspense, but the first hour focuses too much on uninteresting soap opera-esque storylines and introduces too many characters, so it's easy for the viewer to forget the movie is supposed to be about an earthquake.

Once the actual earthquake hits, however, the movie does get pretty fun, though most of its entertainment value is due to unintentional laughs and some really stupid behaviour by the characters; unfortunately, the ending is somewhat abrupt and disappointing and contains some glaring loose ends (most especially when it shows Richard Roundtree's trying to escape a flood and never bothers to reveal whether or not he survives!).

The funniest highlights for disaster movie buffs should be when animated cartoon blood is superimposed over the camera after characters are killed in an elevator, and the scene where a character runs into a house to turn off the gas with a lit cigarette in his mouth!