Black Talon: Broken Mirror
By John Oak Dalton • Apr 30th, 2007 • Category: Action/AdventureIn the near future, a cataclysm has torn civilization asunder, leaving only spandexed superheroines and bandana-wearing, muscle-shirted thugs to pick up the pieces. Into this shattered world comes Black Talon, a rookie superhero trying to solve the mystery of her sister’s death by teaming up with a pair of more experienced costumed crusaders.
Thus opens Black Talon: Broken Mirror, writer/director Andy Rodriguez’s fanfilm-flavored adventure. Rodriguez’s interest in comic book lore, especially with a Silver Age bent, charges the story, propping up rather pedestrian shooting and acting (but does nothing to help a grating, repetitive stable of sound effects). Quite a bit of care is taken with costuming, the superheroine’s backstories, and creating an involved world for the characters to interact in.
But Black Talon is of two minds, and veers quite a ways away from the Silver Age with repeated scenes of Black Talon getting captured, tied up, dragged around, and threatened with ungentlemanly treatment by the aforementioned thugs. Alarmingly, this is often conducted in lingering close-up, making this reviewer wonder who exactly the audience was for this project; it is frequently too mature for kids, but too simplistic for adults.
But I think the storytelling would appeal to comic-book fans–and perhaps some viewers with what we might call more narrow interests–who are willing to overlook the coarse-grained production values.
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John Oak Dalton is a Community Television Station Manager by day, and a DIY acolyte by night. In the 80s he made Super-8 movies and his own basement mix tapes. In the 90s he hosted a cable-access show and made his own zines and minicomics. In the 21st Century he began working with grassroots video and microcinema and writing b-movies, and has more than a dozen projects on the shelf, on screen, in development, or in production.
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