Most movies set on planes fall into one of a few categories. They’re either about some heroic individual foiling a terrorist plot, screwball comedy hijinx or snakes… on a plane. Blood Red Sky attempts to put a serious horror spin on that narrative, replacing the usual infallible male lead with a young mother, harbouring a dark, primordial secret, in a desperate struggle to ensure her son’s survival. Only it doesn’t do it all too well, devolving into a mess of mindless screeching and over-the-top gore as hijackers and hijacked clash; foregoing character development in place of mindless action that fails to excite due to the total lack of tension or stakes established.
While travelling to New York for a life-saving medical procedure with her son Elias (Carl Anton Koch), German widow Nadja (Peri Baumeister) gets far more than she bargained for when her flight is hijacked by a terrorist group. Forced to comply with their every command and unable to dose herself with essential medication, Nadja is forced to unleash a long buried secret: she is a vampire. Now thrust into a deadly game of cat and mouse, Nadja must revert to her primal, bloodthirsty instincts in order to hunt down the hijackers and prevent them from crashing the plane. As events become increasingly violent, Nadja is forced to choose between the safety of her son and ensuring that her horrific condition does not spread outside of the confines of the plane before it lands.
On paper it sounds like an interesting enough idea; an original twist on the plane film that has the potential to be a white-knuckle close-combat vampire thrill ride. The resulting film feels strangely lifeless and devoid of those thrills; especially once it takes a turn into the worst examples of plane-bound films, with Nadja and the hijackers utilising a stupidly over-complex labyrinth of passageways and cargo bays to run around the plane after one another. Not only does it instantly remove the claustrophobia of having to deal with both hijackers and a vampire in a crowded plane filled with innocent bystanders but the layout of these areas make no sense. Characters pop up in places where they shouldn’t and never seem to utilise obvious routes to get to their objectives.
Once Nadja finally clashes with the terrorists, the action is largely confined to generic metallic rooms in the cargo bay with nothing remarkable about them; forcing you to concentrate on the unintelligible scratching and biting going on. Without the passengers nearby to add a level of tension and some stakes to the action there really is no reason to care about these scenes; we have a pretty good idea that the almost unstoppable vampire lady will take out the meagrely armed muscle and even when the film throws a few twists and turns at us, it never manages to make you feel like Nadja is in any real danger. The excessive amount of gore constantly flying from people’s limbs and necks isn’t a substitute for proper fight choreography or genuine scares and by the end of the film I was so desensitised to it, I could have enjoyed a bloody steak with no problem.
The script doesn’t give Baumeister much to work with outside of her bond with Elias, which is easily the beating heart of the film, their reunion the only reason to care at all about what is going on. Her performance essentially boils down to a lot of demonic shrieking and cries for her son in search of this goal and the – admittedly excellent – prosthetics further impede her ability to rely on facial expressions to convey emotion. This leaves young Carl Anton Koch to shoulder a lot of the film’s emotional weight as Nadja’s innocent son Elias. It’s a terrific child performance; Elias is fiercely protective of his mother but shows a remarkable amount of emotional awareness in how he understands the other passengers’ shocked responses and pleads for their understanding. When everything boils to a head it is Elias whose survival we care about, not Nadja’s, and that is a testament to the strength of his acting at such a young age. One to watch.
Ultimately your enjoyment of Blood Red Sky will depend on just how appealing you find the concept of vampires on a plane. The action isn’t particularly memorable and the characters outside of Nadja and Elias function as little more than plot devices to drive the story towards its next action set-piece, but if all you’re looking for is a jumbled mess of fangs and claws then this is your jam. Thankfully the half-assed attempts at social commentary are brushed aside before they have the chance to really drag things down, but the resulting film will likely still feel hollow and ultimately very disposable to everyone outside of its very specific demographic. This is one trip you won’t be rushing to take again.
Blood Red Sky stars Peri Baumeister, Carl Anton Koch, Alexander Scheer, Kais Setti, Dominic Purcell, Kai Ivo Baulitz, Roland Møller, Chidi Ajufo & Graham McTavish – Streaming on Netflix now.