Blood Red Sky – review

Director: Peter Thorwarth

Release Date: 2021

Contains spoilers

Netflix’s latest vampire flick, and between the very toothsome and plane-based trailer and the fact that the opening scenes show the aforementioned plane land at a Scottish military airbase this one is super hard to spoil – vampire, on plane, with son, hijackers… that is almost the plot laid out in full.

Be that as it may, as an action adventure this could have been a bit of an action sub-genre classic. Alas, whilst entertaining it is overly long (it needs at least 30 minutes cutting from the run time), with poor pacing choices including the backstory exposition, which leads to more questions than answers, and missing exposition that might have been more pertinent.

Graham McTavish as Drummond

So, as I say, the film starts with a plane being talked down from autopilot from a control tower as Colonel Alan Drummond (Graham McTavish, Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Monsters and Mutants, Preacher & Castlevania) takes command. The plane lands and in the cockpit is Farid (Kais Setti), the assumed hijacker (the undercurrent of the Western default of Islamophobia is strong in this) who has sniper rifles trained on him. Out of a doorless cargo hatch a young boy, Elias (Carl Anton Koch), exits. The soldiers get him and bring him to base – a translator tries to talk to him but he is silent.

in the hotel

The film moves into flashback. In a hotel room a woman, Nadja (Peri Baumeister), looks in the mirror and then puts a wig on covering her bald head… In an airport Elias checks in for his mother and himself. His case is heavy and Farid helps him lift it, when asked where his mother is he says she is on her way… In the hotel room, Nadja is speaking to a doctor in the US who is showing her the treatment area – she is travelling to New York for experimental radiation therapy. She ends the call when Elias calls to say he has checked in. She goes to him, night having fallen. In the airport we see she has medication – prescription she explains – and we see her (in the toilet) drink something from a bottle – blood – and then inject herself – the drug supresses her vampirism.

Dominic Purcell as Berg

On the plane we quickly discover there are bad guys around. Led by Berg (Dominic Purcell, Blood Creek & Blade Trinity), who is woefully underused, we don’t know what they want. We hear Drummond say that the plane has one of Germany’s terrorist watch list on board – but that's likely one of the innocent dupes (on a list due to racial profiling). The baddies quickly kill the undercover sky marshals and it is revealed that they include in their number the co-pilot (Kai Ivo Baulitz), who kills the pilot, and a new steward, Eightball (Alexander Scheer, Getting my Brother Laid). This is where we really have to suspend disbelief… 

framing Farid

Essentially, and unbelievably, they managed to get the co-pilot, steward and baddy passengers on the same flight – the flight on which they managed to trick three Muslims onto with a fake conference in America to frame them as terrorists – at least one person from ground crew is also in on it, someone who had left a message only viewable in infrared so they knew which panel to get in in order to hack something and they had all the equipment in the hold to blow both the cargo door and the plane, and have parachutes to meet a mid-ocean rendezvous. All for reasons unknown (we get mentions of an ongoing stock market crisis and 9/11 causing a stock crash that could be profited from). Think too hard and it’s really rubbish.

Eightball in vamp mode

Elias is panicky for his mum. Earlier he explained time zones to Farid and it is clear they have selected the flight so they take off and land in New York at night – the plane has changed direction. He realises there is a cargo hatch and runs off to find it, Nadja chases after her son and Eightball shoots her, three time. She falls and Elias is dragged back to his seat. Obviously she gets back up – vanishing into the cargo hold – and then, realising that they are going to destroy the plane, kills a hijacker and then we get hijackers versus vampire. Eightball realises what she is, manages to get her blood and inject himself (though a bite is enough to turn someone) and suddenly we get an outbreak because turning is really quick and, having tasted blood, they quickly become almost feral and blood crazed.

Nadja attacks

I mentioned pacing issues and within the film we get a series of flashbacks with the flashback of how she, as a new mother, lost her husband and was turned. Other than explain why she has a mortal son (and in fact it doesn’t as the speed at which turning occurs and the moving to feral makes us ask more questions of this than the answer it provides), these backstory flashbacks add nothing to the film and serve only to kill the pace. As we are suspending disbelief in a major way just at the hijacking, I doubt any viewer would have had a problem with accepting that she is both a vampire and a mother and is travelling to get a cure. It’s all the backstory we need. I would seriously just cut the inner flashbacks out altogether whilst giving the film a judicious prune.

great imagery

There is some great vampire imagery on display, though that is ignoring how a burnt vampire, engulfed in flames, managed to maintain hair, as Simon Bacon pointed out to me as we discussed the film. The vampires are killed by fire, by sunlight and by stabbing the heart. Unusually, turning can be prevented, if say a hand is bitten, by chopping the hand/limb off before infection spreads. They become rather animalistic, feral as I said earlier. I’ll mention here the acting as Peri Baumeister gives her all – almost channelling Shelley Duvall in the Shining at the head of the film and then revelling in her monsterdom as the vampire was let loose. Alexander Scheer’s psycho-hijacker was all sorts of over-the-top, which worked well, but left him without much room to expand the behaviours when turned. Other performances were solid but, in the main, actors were underused…

Peri Baumeister as Nadja

Of course, this is an action film so we’d expect that character development would be minimal or short hand. However, when you wreck your action’s pace repeatedly the viewer notices the under-use of actors and also notices the joins, the lull allowing the brain to critically analyse what should be a roller-coaster. There are under-current issues explored, the discussion on Islamophobia is obvious and, with Elias as the bridge connecting Nadja and Farid, the connection between the vampire as Other and the Othering of Muslims is clear in the text. Other issues, such as the inherent selfishness of Capitalism – resting squarely on the shoulders of an unpleasant businessman, are there but not nuanced. Again, this isn’t surprising in a film that is meant to be purely action at its core. In the end the pacing had me pushing the score down, but on the other hand the film was watchable. I think the issue is we could have had an action classic had the director and editor been much more disciplined. I was going to push the score down to 5 but ultimately felt that was overly harsh. I’m giving this 6 out of 10 but with serious reservations about the pace and length.

The imdb page is here.