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Today is part three (of four) of my Disaster Blaster series: Earthquake (1974, Mark Robson). I don’t feel like I made it clear enough that, while I take this film to task for lots of reasons, I do love it for the big dumb movie it is.
I’ve said before that good special effects go hand in hand with good acting. Ultimately, it isn’t the quality of the effects that let Earthquake down, it’s the directorial choices around them. Too often the direction of the extras strays into Harold Zoid territory, actors flailing and leaping and running about like headless chickens. At one point, during an impressive miniature shot, Robson (or the second unit) direct extras to leap out of a skyscraper window like lemmings, rendering an exciting moment silly. He’ll also mix serious carnage with a flippant tone. When a bar begins to collapse from the quake, Robson cuts from a shot of a short order cook having an entire pot of boiling water dumped on him, scalding him to death, to Walter Matuschanskayasky’s camping it up as a drunk too sloshed to understand the danger he’s in. At another moment, in a residential neighborhood, a man yells about a gas leak in a house, and some other guy, with a smug look and a cigarette dangling from his lips, goes in to presumably take care of it. Cut to explosion. Punch lines have never been as cheap or cynical.
Today’s ttrpg material is a d20 table with different events that could happen during a disaster-themed game session. It’s meant to be spare and generic, and I think I covered nearly every possibility with it. Good chance I’ll use this in some ttrpg thing going forward.
LINC’S LINKS
• Here’s a review of Earthquake by Gerardo Valero from 2018, on RogerEbert.com. He’s tougher on it than me, but I appreciate the discussion of Sensurround.
• Back in 1996, Arcane, a UK ttrpg magazine, listed what they considered to be the Top 50 ttrpgs of all time. Refereeing and Reflection has a fantastic article going through that Top 50, and considering what it says about the state of the hobby in 2025.
• Here’s a link to A Grandiose Disaster by Interactivities Ink, an 128 page disaster movie ttrpg. Haven’t purchased it (yet) or read it, but gets a link just for existing. $5, cheap!
NEXT TIME, ON AGAINST THE ‘70S:
