Blood Red Sky | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Hm. They already did a plane with venomous snakes on the loose. So how about… vampires?

This vampire version of Snakes on a Plane (2006) gets a bit silly with all the hissing and thrashing and baring of fangs, though it does create tension by confining two threats (vampires and hijackers) in one inescapable place.

Blood Red Sky, with its intriguing German/English language hybrid, asks the question that consistently turns up in vampire flicks: can a person who is inherently good resist the evil that vampirism draws them toward once they are infected? A less typical question that the film asks is whether desperate people can join forces with a would-be enemy to take on an even greater enemy. As expected, some people will act completely out of self-interest, while others will emerge as heroes. Then there’s the more obvious question: how are these people going to get out of this?

Director Peter Thorwarth creates a partnership with the viewer by opening the film with an awkward emergency landing in Scotland. Snipers train their rifles on the plane. Hostage negotiators attempt to assess the situation. Elias (Carl Anton Koch), the film’s boy protagonist, climbs out of the plane. We know, therefore, that the plane has landed and the boy is safe – what we don’t know is what’s happening inside. Everything else in the film will build to this moment. 

Peri Baumeister effectively portrays Elias’s mother Nadja. Before boarding and as the flight begins, the skittish and sickly Nadja struggles to keep something at bay. During the flight, the film offers a series of flashbacks, some of them a bit on the sappy side, to tell the story of how she acquired her affliction. 

The most entertaining of the characters is maniacal hijacker Eightball (Alexander Scheer), who revels in bloodshed. As Eightball bullies and threatens the passengers – he’s not afraid to target the weakest and youngest – his co-conspirators repeatedly refer to him as a “psycho” and suggest that he’s taking things too far. But those who take things too far often make the best villains. 

Does this film do enough to separate it from the mountain of other vampire movies out there? Yes, to an extent. It does lead one to wonder… what’s the next threat filmmakers are going to put on a plane? – Douglas J. Ogurek***