Vampires are such versatile creatures. Starting as refined predators that lurked in dusty old castles in Transylvania and eventually spreading into the modern world like a blood borne virus. Since then they’ve been super heroes, super villains, romantic leads and allegories for virtually any subject you can think of, but Netflix’s German bloodsucker flick, Blood Red Sky, attempts to take matters even further as it enthusiastically tries to mix the blood of Passenger 57 with that of 30 Days Of Night by having its fanged character be the most unlikely thing of all – a loving mother.
However, if we’re being honest, films that end up being exclusive to Netflix – especially horror films – usually end up lacking that certain oomph to make them become genuine classics. Can Blood Red Sky taxi down that genre runway and take flight in a way that other movies on the streaming platform haven’t.
Nadja is a German widow who is suffering from an illness that looks very much like leukaemia, but as she struggles with her adoring son, Elias, hope, apparently, is on the horizon as they are due to take a flight to New York where a doctor waits to begin treatment. However, as time goes on, it’s obvious that despite her bald head and pale visage, there’s something way more sinister going on here, but both her and Elias manage to check in on their flight and take their seats without too much hassle.
However, sometimes hassle finds you and once the flight is in the air, a bunch of bad guys smuggled on board leap into action with the hope of making a bit of cash by faking their own personal terrorist hijacking in order to manipulate the stock market. Led by the grave sneer of Berg, the group start plucking muslim scapegoats off of the passenger list, while taking the odd time out to keep an eye on Eightball, a member of their gang who proves to be a little more psychotic that the average bear, but when he gleefully puts a unnecessary trio of bullets into Nadja, he kicks off a chain of events that could spell the doom of everyone on board.
You see, due to a run in with a vampire years earlier that killed her husband and left her infected with a bloodsucker bite that she’s been struggling to contain in the years since, Nadja has planned this exact flight to guarantee that she takes of at night and lands at night, but thanks to the hijacker’s meddling, her timetable ends up being well and truly fucked. As her bloodlust increases and she takes the fight to the bad guys, the threat of her vampirism could not only prove to be a danger to her son, but when Eightball realises that he could be an even bigger maniac with a bit of vamp DNA, his actions ramp up things to near apocalyptic levels.
Blood Red Sky comes to the party loaded for bear with a ton of hyrda-like plot threads to keep the momentum going as the film hog piles vampires, career criminals, metaphors for motherhood, metaphors for illness and even social commentary on modern terrorism on you during it’s somewhat overlong run time – but the overall effect is that all of its aspects ends up overwhelming the whole. It’s a shame, because I’d wager that a good 75% of the film utterly rocks and delivers exactly the kind of vampire thrills I want from a modernized, full-blooded fang flinger, but while it’s always weird to complain when a horror flick gives you too much, the pace suffers as it tries to shift its log jam of threats down the narrative pipe.
A vampire on a plane is a magnificently simple premise that crackles with promise, especially when you take in an enclosed space and shifting time zones and when you add the premise of a blood-hungry mother, fighting her own urges to protect her son, you’ve got one hell of a idea. If course, the addition of a terrorist plot comes with it’s own complications that also requires a fair bit of build up to get things going – but when the further wrinkles of a psycho terrorist wanting to become a bloodsucker and a subsequent vampire infestation places weight on the story, something has to give.
All these ideas are truly great stuff and any two, or maybe three of them would easily sustain a tight hour and fourty minutes, but when you combine all of them, it provides some gristle that not even a vampire’s teeth can penetrate.
If Blood Red Sky was maybe a six episode miniseries, then all of its moving parts would have far more room to breathe, but the stuff that works, still manages to hold the interest. To be fair, the terrorist stuff doesn’t really bring anything new that you haven’t already seen in every Die Hard ripoff that exists, even with the addition of Dominic Purcell’s Thanos-faced honcho, but the vampire stuff is truly great that leans on a visual look that riffs heavily on Nosferatu meets Steve Niles. Peri Baumeister sells the shit out of the afflicted Nadja, starting as a quiet, pained victim and gradually becomes a snarling, bald animal, and her control of her body as she attempts to combat her weakness for ripping out throats and she proves to be the glue that holds all the threads together.
In fact, as the vampire stuff slowly overtakes the hostage stuff, Blood Red Sky finally finds its groove as it goes from a derivative thriller to feeling more like Lamberto Bava’s Demons but set on a passenger jet and as all these frequent flyers become ravenous for the red stuff and things rapid get even further out of control. The vamps look great, with the char broiled, fully transformed Eightball being a worthy threat thanks to some gnarly prosthetics and that always reliable digitally widened scream that stretches the toothy maw to impossible lengths.
It’s odd to me to complain about a film that gives to too much, because on paper, Blood Red Sky fuckin’ slaps, and when it delves into the gory nitty gritty it works just fine; but with either less time donated to other plot lines, or more of it donated to the the expanded canvas of a series, things could have been way more seismic if its focus had been distributed more evenly.
While certainly slick as fresh blood on a polished floor, director Peter Thorwath can’t quite juggle the load that the overworked script creates, but while the terrorist/hostage angle features nothing more than one dimensional snacks, the vampire stuff goes a great way toward redeeming the overall effect for what us essentially stakes on a plane.
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