Popular Culture Reviews

Blog Post published by Sofia Zepeda on Sunday, July 24, 2016

Tania Darlington Reviews: Stranger Things

Popular Culture Reviews

Stranger Things is a classic science fiction/horror tale of a missing boy and his family’s and friend’s attempts to reconcile the oddities of his disappearance with the eerie activities of a top secret government lab on the outskirts of town. This latest original offering from Netflix is finely crafted to appeal to an audience hungry for 1980s nostalgia, particularly for the classic Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter films of that decade.

Blog Post published by Sofia Zepeda on Saturday, June 25, 2016

Tania Darlington Reviews: Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? (2016)

Popular Culture Reviews

It is difficult to pinpoint the intended audience for James Franco's reworking of Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?. Is it regular Lifetime viewers? Fans of B-movie vampire sex romps? Academics interested in the gender politics of horror? By remaking perhaps the most quintessential of all Lifetime offerings as a lesbian vampire horror melodrama complete with metatextual voiceovers about the functions of gender and sexuality in genre films, Franco attempts to accomplish too much and, as a consequence, actually accomplishes very little.

Blog Post published by Sofia Zepeda on Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Tania Darlington Reviews: UnREAL and The Faith Diaries

Popular Culture Reviews

One of the most buzzed about new series of the Fall 2015 television season was the surprise Lifetime Network hit UnREAL, produced by former Buffy the Vampire Slayer writer/producer Marti Noxon and former Bachelor producer Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, whose short semi-autobiographical film Sequin Raze was the basis for the series.