This forgotten obscurity, made in San Francisco by local talent, was barely released in movie theaters in 1973. It will appeal to people hooked on crappy drive-in movies. To force the release of two imprisoned mafiosi, terrorists conceal an atomic bomb on the Golden Gate Bridge. They kidnap the city's attorney and show him the bomb. Even though they mean business, the D. A. thinks it's a parlor trick engineered by another attorney (played by celebrated lawyer Melvin Belli, who is terrible here.)
Enter G-man Gideon Blake, a substandard cross between James Bond and Dirty Harry who seems to already know about the bomb and the entire plot of the movie. He and clean-cut sidekick Steve spend the rest of the film tracking the villains and arguing the value of using deadly force when saving the world from terrorism.
Blake, who spouts poetry as he kills and says stuff like "Ever since I was born I started to die," is played by steely Ron Casteel, who was a real-life AM radio disc jockey at the time. He delivers every clichéd line with clenched teeth and the conviction of a distracted driver.
Triple-threat writer-producer-director James T. Flocker over-directs his actors and tries to imitate the brutality and hysterical plotting of DIRTY HARRY and its ilk. But Flocker is no Don Siegel. He does get a lot of mileage out of a distortion lens that makes people's asses look enormous. Most of the running time consists of people driving cars and boats around some of the least scenic areas in and around San Francisco.
Even though it rates a zero in almost every department, the final ten minutes of GROUND ZERO are mildly suspenseful, as Blake defuses the bomb atop the Golden Gate and chases the bad guys around on dangerous-looking, high altitude cat-walks.
