SANTA SANGRE is a 1989 Mexican/Italian surrealist thriller directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky and starring his son Axel as Fenix, an uncommunicative young Christ figure residing in a mental health facility in Mexico City...[Read Full Review]

LUNNAYA RADUGA (“Moon Rainbow”) is a 1984 Russian science fiction melodrama directed by Andrei Yermash and based on the novel by Sergai Pavlov...[Read Full Review].

GASPAR NOÉ’s Enter The Void is a challenging synesthesic roller-coaster ride that combines New Age cosmic fatalism, old-school psychedelia and state of the art digital filmmaking to produce of masterpiece of modern nihilism...[Read Full Review]

WHILE WE MOURN for everything that science fiction got wrong, let us stop for a moment to ponder the predictions that have come sadly, tragically, laughably true.  Enter Looker.

[Read Full Review]

PHASE IV is a 1974 science fiction insect fear film directed by famed title sequence creator Saul Bass and starring Michael Murphy, Nigel Davenport and Lynn Frederick as two scientists and a Breck Girl who become trapped in a desert research station while investigating hyper-intelligent ants...

[Read Full Review]

THESE ARE movie and television series reviews I wrote for the online fantasy/science fiction magazine IO9.  The links in the descriptions below are to the original articles on the IO9 site.  If any of the links are broken, you can find copies of the articles on my wiki.

Contact: JPShankel@gmail.com

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PHANTASM is a 1978 gothic horror fantasy written and directed by Don Coscarelli.  It spawned three sequels, all of them about evil dwarf minions and flying silver balls that love exsanguination.

[Read Full Review]

FIRE IN THE SKY is a 1993 alien abduction melodrama based on the true story of Travis Walton,

a forestry worker who was allegedly abducted for five days in 1975 ...[Read Full Review]