Cebalord Very best movie i ever watch

FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Bea Swanson This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

shakercoola The first thing to say is the producers' intention of giving viewers the sense of a big earthquake unfolding works well. The tension builds quite well before the disaster ensues, cutting between the different seisomographic sub-plots. Although some fo the light hearted backstories do not work. Too many scenes border on the extraneous. Every disaster film needs some exposition because it's mostly about setting the audience up to care about the characters under threat or duresse later. This was not made easy with Heston's character and his marital issues and Kennedy's passive aggressive cop. Other characters like a familiar bar drunk and a sexual deviant, and pool players fighting for no reason were baffling. Some of the live action effects are iffy, but overall sound and special effects were quite good and a good score from John Williams. All in all, it's big spectacle and you don't feel short-changed about its 'A' movie pitch.

FlashCallahan Construction Engineer Stuart Graff is estranged from his possessive wife, Remy, and has an affair with Denise Marshall, the widow of a co-worker. Remy tries to persuade her father, who is Stuart's employer, to use his influence to stop Stuart from seeing Denise. Policeman Lew Slade is suspended from the L.A.P.D. for punching an officer from another jurisdiction, so Slade contemplates quitting the police force. Jody, a grocery store manager, lusts after the sister of Sal, assistant to Miles Quade, an aspiring daredevil motor cyclist. The lives of all these people are devastated when a major earthquake rips through Los Angeles and reduces the city to ruins....If it wasn't for the bizarre intertwining stories that accompany the quite impressive shaking of the camera, then this wouldn't be as entertaining as it should be, because it's just over the top, you cannot help but find these narratives just that little more entertaining than the actual titular disaster.There is a wonderful cast here, not as star studded as other disaster films from this decade, but Heston and Kennedy chew more sets than the film destroys.It's tense, there are dancing power lines, exploding everything, self sacrifice, and the most fun these films have, having to guess who will live and who will succumb to the quake.The most bizarre part of the film involves Victoria Principal and William Katt, a wig wearing soldier, who takes great offensive at homophobic slurs.It's not a great film by any lengths, but like all the disaster films made at this time, they are grand, and never fail to entertain.

sddavis63 To give credit where credit is due - those special effects people managed to put together a pretty good depiction of this massive earthquake that strikes Los Angeles. And it goes on and on for quite a long time. And buildings collapse and houses explode as gas lines break and a massive dam is threatened and people are buried in the debris, and they tumble to their deaths or the elevator that they're on crashes down, and ... and ... and ... By the standards of 1970's special effects that was really well done. Unfortunately, you also have to sit through the rest of the movie, which ... well ... ain't so well done!We get almost an hour of soap-ish type filler before the actual earthquake hits. Yes, I know that's mandatory in these kinds of films. It's as if somebody in the 1970's decided that adding all these personal subplots about the characters would make viewers more interested; maybe we'd get to know the characters and their lives better and we'd care more. Uh. No. I just really wanted to get to the earthquake and its aftermath. I didn't really care who was having an affair with who, or any of the other numerous subplots that got going in that first hour - although it was rather fun to watch one cop punch out another in an apparent dispute over jurisdiction and - believe it or not - Zsa Zsa Gabor's hedge (not that she makes an appearance.) Basically, I spent almost an hour thinking, "can't we just get to the earthquake. Please. PLEASE!" And then it comes - and it's great, and it lasts for a few minutes - and then it's over, and we get back into many of those soap-ish subplots, through which we see the aftermath of the earthquake. This was perhaps a little more interesting than the lead-up. For example, although it wasn't graphically depicted, I was a bit surprised to see a movie from this era depict a soldier apparently trying to rape a young woman. But really - the movie had telegraphed for a long time that the real suspense was going to eventually come from the dam bursting and how many were going to be saved and who was going to die as a result. So in that second part of the movie, we waited for that to happen. There was a lot of waiting for things to happen in this movie.This had a decent cast. These 70's disaster movies always seemed to be able to attract well known names, and even a few truly big stars. Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner are in this, for example. There were secondary movie stars like George Kennedy and Walter Matthau (in an inexplicably and totally unnecessary role as a drunk at a bar who basically just wants another drink no matter what's happening around him.) There was Lorne Greene (much better known for his TV work as Ben Cartwright in "Bonanza.") And there was Victoria Principal (still a few years away from TV stardom as Pam Ewing on "Dallas") as the almost rape victim - who I didn't even recognize, as she was made up in this really far- out curly sort of hairstyle. (I had seen her name in the credits and was actually looking for her and didn't recognize her until the closing credits revealed which character she was. I had to go back and look. Now - knowing her character - I could recognize her.)Some of those 1970's disaster type movies are a lot of fun, and pretty well done. I'd say this one doesn't exactly rank at the top (or even near the top) of that list. But the actual earthquake is fun. No doubt about that. (3/10)

JoeKarlosi For a brief time within the 1970s, so-called "disaster films" became something of a genre all their own, and the heroic Charlton Heston was often featured in most of them. This one is Heston's first, as he plays a middle-aged architect in L.A. who realizes that the types of buildings he's helped erect should have been an obvious mistake for an area plagued by regular earthquakes. He's stuck in a dead pseudo marriage with a real bitch of a wife who you'd just love to slap (the aged but once-gorgeous Ava Gardner). Her dad (BONANZA's Lorne Greene) is Heston's boss and father-in-law (hold on a second... Greene and daughter Gardner are only a few years off in age ... what, did Lorne father her when he was seven??). Anyway, Heston's character is smart enough to be openly cheating on his old battle-ax with a younger chickie pooh (Genevieve Bujold).Of course the bizarre castings are always part of the charm of these "jeopardy pictures". So we've also got side plots with Richard Roundtree as an Evel Kenieval type of motorcycle daredevil, whose partner is played by Gabriel Dell (of the old Bowery Boys comedies). George Kennedy is a lot of fun as a hot-tempered cop who gets suspended from the police force for anger management issues. Marjoe Gotner plays a nerdy supermarket cashier who becomes a crazed gun-happy National Guardsman when pressed into public crisis mode -- and he's got the hots for a young and bosomy Victoria Principal (sporting a terrible afro). Walter Matthau provides intermittent comic relief as a drunk at a bar who remains oblivious to anything that's occurring around him in this disaster.There are a few earthquakes, with the Big Rumble being one occurring mid-movie that lasts several minutes, and levels all of Los Angeles. Chuck Heston joins Lorne Greene and George Kennedy in trying to save everybody else. The special effects still are mostly impressive and deliver the goods, except for an occasional misfire (like the spattered blood in a falling elevator). The main draw of a movie such as this is the catastrophic tragedy of it all, and this is well realized even if the sub stories going on around it are mainly fodder. When EARTHQUAKE was released in theaters in 1974, a special audio trick called "Sensurround" was developed to give the effect of the movie seats rumbling as if during an actual earthquake. **1/2 out of ****