Earthquake (1974)

What a boring comedy.

This movie was one of those great disaster movies, back in the day when they made a ton of them. This might be the granddaddy of them all. You know the formula: get to know the complex lives of a bunch of different people, then WHAM! Big monster disaster that puts everything into Chaos. Now we get to see how these people we care about cope with this life changing event.

Problem is, I think it is a dumb formula. I dont really care about these people, and time spent getting to know them is now a chunk of my life forever lost to me. In a well made story character development leads into the major conflict or plot of the story, and is a major aspect of the story telling process. In a movie like this, the first hour of the movie is spent bouncing from one person to the next, showing little mini-episodes in soap opera fashion, with no rhyme or reason to anything that is going on. There is no real plot development from beginning to end.

Of course, once the earthquake hit, I really started laughing. I mean, how can you not laugh to see a little mini truck full of cows drive off a miniaturized elevated freeway, and plummet to their little, mini, plastic deaths? Or when there is a group of people in a falling elevator, when the elevator hits the bottom we get to see animated blood flying at the screen? Honest. Cartoon blood. Or those houses on the hill that are raised up on stilts? Why would you build something like that in southern California, in a fault zone? When I first saw those I knew what was going to happen. I mean, come-on! I really enjoyed the people on the dam, flopping hither and thither, as the camera shakes. Or how about the guy that runs into his house to turn off the gas with a lit cigarette in his mouth!? Ka-Blam!

While some of the visuals of the city in chaos were spectacular, views of block after block of buildings in ruins and flames, and the shear number of extras was staggering, it couldn't make up for how dumb this movie was in general. Why would one group use a fire hose to climb down several stories without actually tying off the end? Why would the city have as an aid station a multi-storied mall that was still standing after the quake. Dont they know about after-shocks? (Oh wait, it was supposed to be quake-proof!)

I think the biggest problem with the movie was they tried to make you care about the people, and then they just killed most of them off. So how can I care? I can't. So instead it is just boring.