“BLOOD RED SKY” My rating: B (Netflix)
121 minutes | No MPAA rating
SPOILER ALERT!!! This film contains a forehead-slapping reveal about halfway through; unfortunately, it’s just about impossible to describe the plot without revealing the big news. So…if you want a pristine viewing experience, STOP READING RIGHT NOW!
For the rest of you, here goes:
“Blood Red Sky” is like “Die Hard” on a trans-oceanic airplane flight. With terrorists. And vampires.
It’s an utterly ridiculous idea performed with such unflinching gravitas that somehow the whole lurid mess works.
The film opens with a commercial airliner touching down at a remote military base in Scotland. There’s a terrorist situation on board. A lone passenger, a little boy, escapes from a cargo door; the authorities try to question him but the kid seems too traumatized to talk.
Flash back to a few hours earlier. Single mom Nadja (Peri Baumeister) and her 10-year-old son Elias (Carl Anton Koch) are boarding a night flight from Europe to the USA.
Nadja apparently is a cancer victim…she hides her bald head beneath a wig and has the gaunt features of someone who’s been through serious chemo. Think Noomi Rapace as a crack addict
Nadja has an appointment in NYC with a medical specialist who may have answers for her condition.
But wouldn’t you know it? There’s a bunch of international terrorists on board. Their motives are fuzzy — they are posing as Islamic extremists but that may be a cover for a more mercenary goal — and they’ve incorporated into their conspiracy a co-pilot and flight attendant.
One of them, a sadist known as Eightball (Alexander Scheer), is so perverse in his treatment of the terrified passengers that even his criminal cohorts are appalled.
The highjackers herd the passengers to the rear of the plane, separating Nadja from her emergency medical kit. We assume the injections she’s been taking have something to do with her cancer, but denied her medication she begins changing. Her eyes transform into those of a cat; her bones seem to have grown sharp beneath her features. Her teeth…well, they’re getting ugly.
Tha’s right, ladies and gents, Nadja is a vampire. Flashbacks reveal how she was bitten by one of those nasty bloodsuckers while on a family vacation (her husband didn’t make it); now she relies on injections to keep her human form. Without them she’s getting very, very hungry for blood.
You’d think a twist like that would be enough for director Peter Thorwarth and co-writers Stefan Holtz. But no. Before long the terrorists have deliberately exposed themselves to the vampire’s bite and are transforming into flesh-gnashing fiends.
So now you’ve got bad vampires (the terrorists) and a good vampire (Nadja) squaring off in an epic confrontation. The crawlspaces and cargo areas in the belly of the aircraft become a claustrophobic battleground. Elias, because he’s a tiny person, takes a key role in exploring the labyrinthian maze.
And to make things even more complicated, Nadja is fighting desperately to ignore the call of blood and retain her human consciousness. Will she be able to save little Elias before reverting 100 percent to vampirism? And what happens when the sun comes up?
The premise of “Blood Red Sky” is too ludicrous to countenance…and yet I found myself hugely entertained by the whole preposterous enterprise.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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