What Mark Robson built in 1967’s Valley of the Dolls — a quintessential L.A. — he tore down less than a decade later with Earthquake, his penultimate picture as director. Released at the height of Hollywood’s disaster craze, the movie beat The Towering Inferno into theaters by one month, but lost to Irwin Allen’s flame-broiled spectacle in three categories at the Academy Awards. Often wrongly assumed to be an Allen production, Earthquake has the next best thing: Jennings Lang, the man behind the Airport franchise.

Co-scripted by The Godfather author Mario Puzo, Earthquake’s main plot concerns ace construction engineer Graff (Charlton Heston, who headlined Airport 1975 just one month prior) and his sham of a marriage to a miserable, pill-popping harridan (Ava Gardner, 1977’s The Sentinel) who happens to be the daughter of his boss (Lorne Greene, Battlestar Galactica). Graff nonagressively puts the make on a co-worker’s widow (Genevieve Bujold, Dead Ringers) on the day that “the big one” hits the Golden State. (With a split-nearing couple also at its epicenter, 2015’s San Andreas practically qualifies as a remake.)

Intermittently intersecting subplots involve an idealistic cop (George Kennedy, also fresh from Airport 1975) suspended for damaging Zsa Zsa Gabor’s hedges in a car chase, a would-be Evel Knievel (Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree) perfecting a stunt on a rickety wooden ramp, and a shopkeeper-turned-soldier (former evangelist Marjoe Gortner, Starcrash) who gets all handsy and rapey with a busty customer (Victoria Principal, TV’s Dallas) for stealing a donut in the aftermath. The only thing more perverse than Gortner’s mentally unhinged character is Principal’s comically large Afro.

She’s not the only chalk-white cast member sporting a ’fro; in a pseudonymous credit, Walter Matthau appears as a drunk decked out in pimp duds. Occasionally, he awakens from his shot-glass stupor to mutter a now-dated famous name without comment, e.g. Bobby Riggs. To borrow a popular Internet phrase I cannot stand, yet is wholly appropriate, I can’t even.

While Earthquake is generally remembered today for its much-hyped, low-frequency Sensurround process that enabled audiences to “feel” the tremors, its visual effects remain impressive — well, most of them. When the earth initially starts a-rockin’, Robson warps the frame, which looks as phony as the illustrated blood spatter that later closes an ill-fated elevator ride. Luckily, those cheats are the exception to the epic rumble of rubble that retains the power to jolt. So does a rather pessimistic ending. —Rod Lott

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You know the hoary cinematic chestnut of the retiring cop whose last day proves quite the pickle? The reality-rooted The Wave ups that finality ante with a frickin’ tsunami! Not for nothing did this taut thriller become the year’s biggest deal in its home country of Norway, where the scenario depicted is expected to happen in the not-too-distant future — all a matter of when, not if.

Reluctantly, family man Kristian (Kristoffer Joner, The Revenant) is leaving the quaint town of Geiranger behind — and his post as a shaggy geologist watching the mountains from command central at the Early Warning Center — for a move to a buttoned-up, better-paying career in the oil industry. He’s having a hard time letting go — a grip that becomes even tighter when an anomaly in groundwater levels raises an instinctual concern that just won’t settle down.

This is why: Because if the mountain were to expand enough to cause a rockslide, a 279-foot wave would result in turn and head straight for the good people of Geiranger, who would receive advance notice of 10 minutes, tops. And that is exactly what happens, smack-dab in the middle of tourist season, with Kristian’s wife (Ane Dahl Torp, Dead Snow) and kids as sitting targets, holed up at a hotel precariously not far enough above sea level.

The Wave is a disaster film of seismic proportions, but a damned fine one. Although it delivers the (damaged) goods in visual spades, it is cast neither in the all-star Irwin Allen cheese of the 1970s, nor the blockbuster-slick style of the subgenre’s 1990s resurgence (as seen in Twister, Volcano, Daylight, et al.). Plausibility trumps panache; science is practically a member of the supporting cast; subplots are kept to a bare minimum; celebrity cameos are nonexistent; and, like 2012’s true-life tsunami tale, The Impossible, the story is free of sentiment until the final scene. Nothing in director Roar Uthaug’s previous hit, the 2006 frozen-over ski-lodge slasher Cold Prey, suggests the sure hand that guides The Wave to such great heights. —Rod Lott

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