SINGAPORE - AFTERSHOCK is a very serious disaster movie.

It's based on the 1976 Tangshan earthquake in China, which killed about a quarter of a million people.

Director Feng Xiaogang's story focuses on a female survivor who reunites with her family after having been assumed dead for 32 years. The film is a stark portrayal of a terrible calamity.

It's very different from the Hollywood idea of catastrophe, which typically piles on the most spectacular - and, hence, spectacularly shallow - mayhem (with kicka** CGI) that can happen when Mother Nature decides to play Big Scary Daddy.

Here's the difference: Aftershock features the aftermath, where the human drama makes for more potent seismic trauma.

But that's box-office poison to Hollywood. Studios there believe the Disaster is the main thing, with the human stories being annoying sideshows (for instance, Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet playing Skinny Romeo and Fat Juliet on the Titanic).

Roland Emmerich's end-of- the-world epic, 2012, with its quakes, eruptions, giant flood and everything including the kitchen sink, set a whole new standard for hyper overkill.

It had the emotional resonance of, well, a kitchen sink.

Those fellas in Tinseltown basically can be quite disastrous with their disasters. And, tragically, we think there's still room in the giant hole in the ground for some more:

DISASTER FILM #1: GIANT L.A. EARTHQUAKE-CUM-DISASTROUS JAIL TERM
Somebody must pay for the wanton excesses and sins of Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, The Last Airbender and the remakes of Melrose Place and Clash Of The Titans - hence, an earthquake.

The human-drama angle can be the nerve-wracking escape attempt by a boozy but teary-eyed party-hopping starlet, who's locked unluckily in a prison cell just as the quake hits.

Suggested stars: Sam Worthington, Britney Spears, Heather Locklear and Lindsay Lohan as the caged-up drunk skunk

DISASTER FILM #2: HUMONGOUS OIL SPILL CATASTROPHE-WITH-CLASSIC BRITISH VILLAIN By some colossal, asinine blunder, oil from a hole in the seabed escapes and threatens to turn the world's vast oceans pitch-black. The enveloping dark mass approaches Washington like the Black Death.

Everything in its path - fish, birds, see hum, Aquaman - die despite a 100-day hazmat shower. The United States president goes to the beach and adopts a tarred baby dolphin with Angelina Jolie.

The villain of the company who started the disaster is a snide, obnoxious Brit like Alan Rickman in Die Hard, who refuses to apologise and dismisses all charges against him as a "load of crab".

Suggested stars: Alan Rickman, Angelina Jolie, Eddie Murphy as the president

DISASTER FILM #3: VOLCANIC ERUPTION-AND-ECONOMIC CATASTROPHE
It's a gigantic double whammy as Wall Street crashes and burns again, just as Main Street is engulfed by a volcanic eruption. The lava from the volcano (the hill with the Hollywood sign unexpectedly erupts) is hotter than the one Tommy Lee Jones' disaster movie, Volcano, where a guy actually melted into nothingness.

As people, cars and buildings melt, entire fortunes also disintegrate when America's trillion dollar-debt of finally blows up like Mount Vesuvius, too.

The president of the US goes to the nearest bank and withdraws one last dollar before the heat crispy-fries him. Suggested stars: Tommy Lee Jones, Bill Gates, Eddie Murphy as the president

DISASTER FILM #4: FLAMING HIGH RISE-WITH-MAD MAX RIOT After an inflammatory phone call from an enraged Mel Gibson to his former girlfriend, where he erupts against African-Americans, Latinos, Jews and every conceivable minority, including iPad users, the city explodes into a cauldron of riots, arson, looting and rave parties.

A poorly ventilated building catches fire and turns disastrously into the Towering Inferno.

Gibson heroically turns into Braveheart as he inspires fellow rescuer-ranters - Russell Crowe, Christian Bale and Michael Richards - with the rallying cry: "They may take our lives, but they'll never take our extinguishers!"

Suggested stars: Mel Gibson, Rus- sell Crowe, Christian Bale, Oksana Grigorieva as the former girlfriend

DISASTER FILM #5: HUGE HISTORIC FLOOD-AND-NO SHOPPING DAYS
In a major blockbuster shot in Singapore, a freak flood astonishingly engulfs the most important road which even Elton John sang a song about.

Citizens, permanent residents, tourists and millions of construction workers look on with amazement as the onrush- ing waters cover the lowlands, where even manly dykes carrying sandbags can't put up dykes to stop the disastrous overflow.

In the aftershock of the utter shock, shops named Wetties, Massimo Drippy and Poseidon (a branch of high-end fashion house Hermes) pop up to sell world-class scuba-diving gear.

Suggested stars: Not casted yet, except for Paul the World Cup Octopus as the flood oracle

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