The very second the that ill-fated cruise liner did half a barrel roll in The Poseidon Adventure, the race was on to copy and paste the Irwin Allen fomula onto as many disaster movies as possible. However, while it’s arguable that the genre reached its apex in 1974 with Irwin’s flaming extravaganza, The Towering Inferno, it also sort of ran aground the same year with Earthquake, an attempt to out-Irwin Irwin by going bigger and crazier than any disaster movie has ever gone before.
While other instances of the genre saw impossibly starry casts smothered in grime while contained within a sinking ship or a enkindled skyrise, Mark Robson’s Earthquake let its destructive urges run rampant all over the notoriously shaky city of Los Angeles.
Crammed with recognizable faces as they face down more intercity carnage than Tokyo withstanding a morning stroll from a giant, irradiated lizard, the movie obviously attacks its concept with the best of intentions but ends up being one of the weirdest disaster flicks on the crumbling block.
As the sun rises on another day in L.A., ex-football star and current construction engineer Stewart Graff feuds with his fading starlet wife Remy, over his relationship with the widow of a former friend. As Stewart blames himself for the death of Denise Marshall’s husband, the possessive and jealous Remy constantly picks fights with her husband as he spends more and more time with the single mother and her freckled moppet, Corry.
Meanwhile, after a mild earthquake shakes up everyone’s soda, an intern at the California Seismological Institute deduces that within a day or two, an earthquake the strength of all the nukes dropped during World War II will strike the city like a drunken stepfather – but his superiors desire to play things low-key in case they’ve gotten it wrong and only alerts the National Guard and police, just in case.
While we set up other characters such as burned out cop, Lou Slade; motorcycle stunt team Miles Quade, Sal Amici and his busty sister Rosa; and Jody, an obviously unhinged store manager/soldier in the National guard; the big one measuring 9.9 on the Richter scale finally hits, pancaking buildings and screaming stunt people alike as biblical levels of chaos reduce the Los Angeles skyline to flaming rubble.
However, drama is drama and while our disparate cast of characters struggle to survive, their various issues continue on despite the rampant death and devastation. Stewart is still caught in his weird-ass love triangle despite having the complexion of a catcher’s mitt; Lou still battles on despite his cynicism and the batshit Jody uses his new found authority to gain bloody revenge on those that have mocked him. However, with the Mullholland Dam on the verge of breaking, how much time to these survivors have to clear away their personal shit.
Whichever way you slice it, Earthquake is a fucking weird movie. While its normal for disaster movies to deal out equal amounts of hope and malicious cruelty, it seems that the filmmakers never actually got that Nemo and attacks its grisly business with a fiendish, sadistic glee that make other movie’s of its ilk feel positively chipper by comparison. The main issue is that while movies like The Towering Inferno or The Poseidon Adventure tried to create likable characters all connected by the fact that they all belonged in the tower block or cruise liner, Earthquake simply says “fuck that” and crams it’s running time with the most utterly random selection of weirdos you can find. Charlton Heston, gurns, winced and squints his way through proceedings while looking like a leather handbag with IBS, but its tough to buy him as a saviour figure when his plot thread sees him happily engaging in an affair with a woman half his age and whose husband was a friend of his. Also, the fact that his wife, played by Ava Gardner, is portrayed as a boozy shrew, she’s actually not wrong as Stewart really is schtupping Geneviève Bujold’s comely actress. Jesus, even Remy’s dad – played by Ben Cartwright/Commander Adama himself, Lorne Greene – seems to be perfectly ok with it and even offers Stewart and fricking promotion!
In comparison, George Kennedy’s embittered Sergent is a far more reliable lead and seems to be the only person within a thousand miles of the epicentre who actually is even remotely helpful with the rest of the cast being something of a bizarre crapshoot. I’m not exactly sure what exactly going on with Richard Roundtree’s struggling stunt driver, Marjoe Gortner’s lunatic soldier or the prominence of Victoria Principal’s breasts, but at times the whole movie feels like an apocalypse has struck the set of The Jerry Springer show with all the odd character arcs that fly all over the place. Yes, having flawed leads in your film certainly makes things interesting, but having your aging main character’s mistress describe his lovemaking as ” angry” makes you wonder if you actively want anyone to survive this thing.
Almost coming second place to the turbulent character arcs is the Earthquake itself and despite some obvious model work (are all the houses in California make of cardboard), the odd, noticable wonky visual effect (who’s bleeding cartoon blood in the falling elevator?) and more shaky-cam than the bridge of the Enterprise, the titular disaster is deliriously mean spirited enough to be worth wading through all the human histrionics to get to.
Be warned, despite apparently being a PG (at least, the version I watched claimed that rating), Earthquake plays surprisingly rough as its procession of horrors plays out. A woman gets beaned by a tumbling window pane and screams her way to the afterlife with a face full of glass as her daughter calls her name; a kitchen hand gets drenched by a pot of boiling water while an uncredited Walter Mathieu – dressed in a pimp suit and drunk acting like his life depends on it – prat falls in some staggeringly out of place comic relief; Jody machine guns his bullies to death under the pretence of looting, butcisxactualky still seething that they called him gay. It’s grim stuff and chaotically edited together to maximise the drama but at the expence of the more subtle details. For example, the last time you see Richard Roundtree, his character is inexplicably racing the rushing waters of the burst dam on his motobike, but we’re given no word whether or not he actually survives – similarly, the out-of-nowhere, down-beat ending that sees Stewart have to choose between Remy and Denise barely has any set up, relying on a single glance from Heston before launching into an endgame that’s as odd as it is unexpected.
Featuring character work that plays like Roger Corman produced Magnolia and carnage that isn’t anywhere near as well judged as Irwin Allen’s earlier works, Earthquake is still, tremendously entertaining, if only for the wrong reasons and watching its celebrated cast wade through such hokey proceedings proves to be perversely fun the weirder and nastier it gets. But then, I guess its only right that a movie about a crumbling L.A. has been made with such uneven foundations…
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