REVIEW: ‘Blood Red Sky’ Has a Great Premise, But Inconsistent Execution

Airplanes are quite frightening when you step back and think about them—machines capable of defying gravity, all while ferrying passengers in a cramped hull to locations that are thousands of miles apart. Now, imagine being on a plane with not only a Vampire, but terrorists also, and you have your plot for Blood Red Sky. The German-made Netflix original movie is directed by Peter Thorwarth, starring Peri Baumeister (Nadja), Carl Anton Koch (Elias), Kais Setti (Farid), Dominic Purcell (Berg), Alexander Scheer (Eightball), Chidi Ajufo (Curtiz Hightower), Roland Møller (Karl), and Kai Ivo Baulitz (Bastian Buchner).

Blood Red Sky details the journey of a mother and her son as they attempt to fly to New York in search of a cure for her Vampirism. That is until the plane is hijacked. In a desperate act to protect her son, and get the plane back on track, Nadja must give in to her baser Vampire instincts and eliminate the threats. The plan is simple, but the execution is rarely ever that smooth and chaos ensues.

Netflix has had some BRILLIANT international films and series as of late, with Blood Red Sky attempting to follow in the footsteps of some of its predecessors. The film does conjure up similar parallels in tension and suspense of Into The Night (a post-apocalyptic series from Belgium) given both plot locations are set primarily aboard a plane in mid-flight.

That tension is wholly felt through the character of Nadja, a woman who’s been battling her urges as a Vampire since she was first turned when her son was just a baby. Now, an American doctor is offering a potential cure. This Hail Mary option is portrayed as a long time coming if she can just resist her urges through the flight from Germany to New York. With the introduction of the plane being hijacked by terrorists, you feel a sense of empathy for this antihero. With Nadja’s back up against the wall, she’s forced into an impossible situation.

Baumeister does a fantastic job of conveying physical pain that visually borders between a look of constant nausea, and writhing with uncontrollable hunger. Her young son Elias serves as her moral compass and Koch does a great job partnering with Baumeister.

This conflict of Nadja’s choices drives the plot forward and adds that begrudging acceptance of the darkness she’s been fighting against for years. Not only must she fight to save herself, and her son, she’s also battling with her own morality to protect the passengers on the plane.

While the action started off excellently, the film fails to maintain a consistent pace. There are moments where the action is very high intensity, but then it’s poorly contrasted against sequences of periods that lull, which creates this sense of the film limping to its final climax. These moments serve more as a filler between the action, and disrupt the momentum of the action, while not adding anything to the major plot itself.

The film seems to want to be both a suspense-building horror and a high-action thriller, but ultimately it just results in the final product having too much on its plate. The culmination of which creates a sense that the film is too long.

The vampire scenes themselves become too frivolous and plentiful, and the over abundance of the imagery causes a need to oversell the danger. While it fails to that, it did conjure up the image of two cats in an alley hissing at each other without delivering any serious intensity. When you see the monster that much, it loses the mystique and fear the viewer creates in their mind. With all that said, I did still enjoy it, but it’s more of a B-movie level film than what I was hoping for.

Overall, Blood Red Sky is itself a fantastic premise that starts off really well but sadly hits too many obstacles along the way to make a great story. The film is 20-30 minutes too long, while also suffering from a lack of restraint and selective editing. It’s an enjoyable B movie vampire-centric story at best.

Blood Red Sky is available now exclusively on Netflix.