MoviePlex is playing the 1974 flick Earthquake. I was a teenager when it came out and it was one of the top grossing movies of that year.
Man, does it suck. You wouldn’t believe how bad the acting is.
And the special effects are totally lame. The blood looks exactly like the cherry goop used on store bought cakes. It’s more pink than red and has a weird texture to it.
On the elevator scene it looks like they use cartoon for the blood splash. Really hokey.
I can’t believe this glob of turkey dump didn’t get thrashed by Mystery science theater 3000. It was just begging for it!
I’ve never seen it, but I was in elementary school when it came out and it was definitely very popular with that age group. This may account for a lot of its box office success.
I know, right? Why didn’t they use CGI like Avatar and other films?
In movies of the '60s and '70s, the blood in many films looked like red paint.
I’ve seen a lot of movies from the '30s on, and can you believe their so-called ‘special effects’? Airplanes and ships were obviously models. King Kong was all jerky. (Again, why didn’t they use CGI?) Bad acting? Check out another '70s film: Star Wars.
Earthquake, Towering Inferno and Meteor (1979) were all terrible movies. Earthquake suffered from the worst cast of the 3. The Airport movies at least gave us Airplane! so I’ll give them that much and while not great art, The Poseidon Adventure was probably the best of the lot.
The big draw for Earthquake, as I recall, was that it was presented in Sensesurround. Theaters installed banks of speakers which projected inaudible sound waves at 120 dB. These waves created a pressure effect meant to stimulate the experience of actually being in an earthquake for theater audiences. They were also attracted by the star-studded cast.
Earthquake came out while I was in high school and was very popular. It seemed so high tech, what with the theaters wired to vibrate. There were all sorts of apocryphal rumors of movie goers emerging from watching it only to find a real quake had occurred while they were inside.
I don’t really like Leonard Maltin, but his review of Airport '79 is the best:
“Robert Wagner is a brilliant scientist, George Kennedy and Bibi Andersson make love by the fire, John Davidson’s hair stays in place when the plane turns upside down, and Mercedes McCambridge is a Russian gymnastics coach. Thank God Charo is around for credibility.” – Leonard Maltin re. The Concorde…Airport '79
Damn it, I had forgot Airport '79, why did you have to remind me.
As to Airplane! I know, as pretty much everyone that has been on this board for years does, that it was based on the Zero Hour! but many of the jokes came directly from the Airport movies and they were the recent movies being parodied. I watched Zero Hour! once on TCM, it was funny but only because I knew Airplane! so well.
I saw Earthquake in the theater, in California in 1974. The theater tested out those speakers, the SunSurround, ones. Cranked them way up and I’m told the bar next door to the theater(it was in a shopping mall) emptied out in panic. A friend of mine in the barracks(Army) had been a ten year old child when the 1964 Alaska earthquake hit and she said the speakers did sound a lit like what she heard when her family got out of their house.
Yeah, it may not have been the best movie ever, but it was fun. And when I saw it I was in the same theater showing with Clint Eastwood, although I never saw him. A friend with me spotted him in line(this was Monterey, CA) and didn’t tell me until afterwords. Grrr.
I was a kid when it came out and, as I recall, I saw it at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. There were rumors that pieces of plaster might come off of the roof and fall on your head because of the vibrations.
None of the disaster movies with ensemble casts was particularly a good movie. Bad plots, poor acting for the most part (ensemble casts filled with washed-up or B-movie actors), and special effects that left much to be desired, even at the time. Fortunately, I didn’t have any of them inflicted upon me at the time. Sadly, I wasn’t much older when they were.
Of course, lack of credible special effects doesn’t keep a movie from being good: Jaws, for example.
