What a disaster...

"Earthquake" (1974)

What goes wrong: A big one hits Los Angeles and the city literally falls to pieces.

Who the movie blames: The engineers who built the city in the first place — both for picking a bad location and for making everything out of Styrofoam.

The real disaster: Amazingly, endless scenes of cheap scenery collapsing on actors who loved to chew it was exactly what the moviegoers of 1974 wanted to see, and the film was a smash hit. The quake itself does more damage to the city than the nuclear explosion in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” most of which could have been avoided had the characters not used attics and ventilation shafts as storage for bricks, plaster and plywood.