Schlocking Mess

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

EARTHQUAKE

Directed by MARK ROBSON Screenplay by GEORGE FOX and MARIO PUZO

In the history of movie gimmickry, which includes Emerge, Smellovision and 3-D, Sensurround is by no means the least effective or the most offensive. Like its predecessors, it may be seriously defined as an attempt to break through film's customary sensory limits. More cynically, it is a means of luring the credulous into paying good money for a bad picture. Sensurround consists of nothing more than a bank of woofers that emit low-pitched rumbling sounds, causing the theater to vibrate in a mildly alarming manner whenever earth tremors are seen to move, shake and ultimately destroy the Los Angeles we know and love.

On the whole, indeed, Sensurround is more realistic than the film's visual special effects, which are rather schlocky, compared even with such antique earth-moving projects as San Francisco (1936) or Looking for Trouble, a 1934 quickie by William A. Wellman that had some of the scariest fis sure footage ever shot. Certainly Earthquake's phony vibes are grabbier than any of the writing or acting, which is perfunctory even by the rather primitive standards of the disaster genre.

As usual in films of this sort, it requires a cataclysm to resolve the simple domestic problems of the hero (Charlton Heston) and his wife (Ava Gardner).

There is also the inevitable nice widow lady (Genevieve Bujold) to complete the triangle, which rests on a base of near-star supporting players (George Kenne dy, Lome Greene, Richard Roundtree, Marjoe Goertner, Lloyd Nolan). In or der to give all these people something to do, the movie is crammed with sub plots -- all of them handled awkwardly.

Finally, in the ugliest convention of the genre, the camera lingers sadistically on the ruins of a legendary beauty, Miss Gardner, as if deglamorizing her could compensate for all the film's other dis honesties and ineptitudes.

Sensurround will probably be in stalled only in first-run engagements.

Thus there is some slight excuse for hur rying to see the film. There are of course much more compelling reasons for avoiding it entirely.

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