‘Blood Red Sky’: Netflix’s Vampires On A Plane Premise Is Good, The Movie Sucks [Review]

The studio pitch and mile-high concept of “Blood Red Sky”— “it’s ‘Snakes on a Plane’ with vampires, and a terrorist hijacking!”—is intriguing, potentially twistedly funny, and surely enough for Netflix to gamble on. Sadly, for filmmaker Peter Thorwarth, “Blood Red Sky” cannot live up to its core idea, not in a way that amplifies its outrageously wacky premise, nor in a way that makes it even a mildly entertaining watch. And for one, if you’ve come looking for a ridiculous thriller in the vein of Samuel L. Jackon‘s corny but pleasurable B-movie thriller, you’ve come to the wrong place with this painfully self-serious, misguided effort.

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Thanks to a transfusion that might cure her disease, German actress Peri Baumeister co-stars as Nadja, a cancer patient off to the United States. She chugs medicine in the airplane bathroom while her son, Elias (Carl Anton Koch), snuggles his teddy bear and waits for his mother to return. After a few minutes, the camera picks up some suspicious-looking characters, including a pair of hunks who give each other a head nod, a pair of Muslims who are “suspicious” because of their race, and a flight attendant whose kindness seems stilted and phony.

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Here’s where the vampires come into play. Nadja may be a loving mother, but she’s also a blood-sucking monster. When a group of terrorists takes control of the plane, she has no choice but to unleash her fangs. Her eyes turn red, her mouth waters, her maternal instincts kick in–this mama bear vamp doesn’t play with her food; she devours it. She rips into the first terrorist she sees (a white man who frames the attack on Muslims), and gallons of gore spray onto the screen, a moment that will either have you cheering or looking away in disgust. In flashbacks, we see how she was turned to the dark side, though not before she turns a few terrorists into Nosferatus. The flight turns into a real shit show, and Elias shoots the camera a look that practically screams, “I’ve had it with these motherf*cking vampires on this motherf*cking plane!”

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What follows isn’t so much scary or ironically funny as it is unbearable. You’re either going to be able to watch vampires rip out throats, blood, and guts happily feasted on, or you’re not, that depends on your taste, but there’s little in the way of a story or character development beyond that. Regardless, the proceedings are bleak and pitch black. The one ray of sunshine is the film’s Final Girl/ Protective Mother/Monster, a role that Baumeister sinks her teeth into. There’s a scene where she gets to beat up her son’s bully, which is a nice slice of revenge fantasy. But it doesn’t tie into the plot or even an emotional theme; rather, it is just another moment in an endless and inane slaughter stream.

Surprisingly, Thorwarth (“If It Don’t Fit, Use a Bigger Hammer,” “Der letzte Bulle“) manages to create something dreary and dour. As a student of horror, his craft is usually masterful. Yet all the forced Dutch angles and dolly shots in the world can’t save this plane from barely taking off outside the premise, which has no bite. Essentially, the script takes a campy premise and has the bright idea of morphing it into a grim, dead-serious drama for some reason. And while horror doesn’t have to be “fun,” the film could have stood to have a modicum of self-awareness in its ludicrous premise. Instead, it doubles down on its grave social commentary of prejudice.

It’s clear that Thorwarth was trying to say something about how we judge people by their color, not their character. But the message is garbled, doused in blood, and lost in viscera, which makes its weak, half-hearted attempts at something to say even harder to stomach. [D+]