BLOOD RED SKY : Monday 26th July 2021.

With Greater Sydney still in COVID lockdown, and as a result all cinema's closed until August 29th at least now, I've been reviewing over the last few weeks some the latest feature films released recently onto Netflix. One such film that I watched from the comfort of my own home this week is the German and UK Co-Produced action horror film 'BLOOD RED SKY' that is Directed and Co-Written by the German film maker, Writer, Actor and Producer Peter Thorwarth. The film was released on Netflix on 23rd July and is an original film for the streaming service. 

The film opens up at a remote Scottish RAF Base airport where an aeroplane is seen coming in for an emergency landing. Air traffic control are guiding the plane in as it is believed that a terrorist is in the cockpit trying to land it. Colonel Alan Drummond (Graham McTavish) arrives on the scene and takes control of the proceedings watching the now stationery plane from the ATC tower. He is in radio contact with the man in the cockpit, and his snipers strategically located around the perimeter of the airport have him in their sights. Then from the cargo hold, a door opens, a parachute is deployed down from which emerges a child. The special forces advance on the child, and take him in for questioning, but he refuses to speak. The plane meanwhile, remains on the tarmac while Drummond and his men monitor what unfolds. The female officer questioning the child ask what happened on the plane.

We then go back twelve hours or so, and that child, Elias (Carl Anton Koch) and his German widowed mother Nadja (Peri Baumeister) prepare to leave on an overnight flight to New York. Elias goes on ahead to check in their luggage, while Nadja prepares herself for the journey and has a video link-up with a doctor in New York who is able to provide treatment for her leukemia that will restore her back to full health. At the airport, after Nadja has arrived, Elias meets Farid (Kais Setti) who is boarding the same flight (Transatlantic 473) to attend a conference, and they make a connection. Nadja returns having taken some more medications, and is introduced to Farid, but quickly dismisses him.

Shortly after take off and as the passengers are settling in for a non-eventful flight across the Atlantic Ocean, a group of men including the Co-Pilot Bastian (Kai Ivo Baulitz) shrewdly murder the three air marshals on the plane and disable the black box flight recorder so the plane can't be tracked. Berg (Dominic Purcell) their leader makes an announcement over the PA system that he is now in control of the plane and expects all passengers to be compliant until a ransom is paid. 

Elias makes a dash for it and attempts to hide, while Nadja goes to retrieve him. Eightball (Alexander Scheer) one of the more unhinged hijackers sees them and shoots Nadja several times in the chest. Assuming she's dead, Elias is plonked back down in his seat where Farid tries to console the sobbing young boy. Berg then begins the second phase of their plan, by forcing Farid to record a prepared statement as though the plane has been hijacked by terrorists for a suicide attack, knowing it will be shot down.

Nadja slowly begins to come round but she remains motionless. She begins to recall the day her husband, Nikolai, was killed. He had gone to a local farmhouse for help when their car broke down during a snow storm late at night and in the middle of nowhere. Failing to return Nadja went in search for him, finding footsteps in the snow that led to the abandoned farmhouse. Following a trail of blood, she stumbles across the body of Nikolai and was then attacked by his murderer, a vampire who managed to bite Nadja on the hand before being burned to death by the sunrise. Shortly thereafter Nadja turns into a vampire, and later went back to the farmhouse in search of answers. She comes across an elderly vampire who tried to shoot her for killing his son, but she manages to overpower him and beat him to death with his crutches before escaping with several dozen vials of vampire suppressant and setting the farmhouse ablaze.

Nadja is now fully conscious and manages to gain entry to the cargo hold, where she removes the contact lenses and dentures that mask her mutated eyes and fangs before killing and feeding on a dog. A hijacker catches her in the act and she kills him and drinks his blood, which then transforms her fully into a vampire. By injecting herself with the suppressant she tries to find the pilot only to be told that he's dead. She then finds another man who claims to be able to fly a plane having taken a few simulator lessons and they manage to regain control of the plane just as the hijackers are about to parachute out. Berg tries to take back control of the cockpit before Nadja surprises and bites him. She then stabs him with a knife cleanly through the heart killing him before he can transform fully.

The remaining hijackers, have come to the stark realisation of exactly what they're dealing with, and so they order Eightball to kill Nadja. He subdues her with an Ultra Violet torch light before extracting some of her blood with a syringe. Having whittled down a wooden ice hockey stick to a pointed end Eightball is about to drive the stake through her just as Elias uses Berg's gun to shoot out a window and depressurise the plane. The hijackers take back control of the cockpit, send the plane into a deep dive and so restore the cabin pressure. Eightball flees into the cargo hold and sits in a souped up Merc in the cargo hold fitted with bullet proof glass. Nadja follows him and shoots at the glass with little effect. She locates a steel rod and punches a hole through the glass where the bullets had most impact attempting to impale him but this too proves unsuccessful. 

Eightball then injects himself with Nadja's blood, as she pours of a bottle of spirits into the hole in the window and then throws in a lighted match trying to set him on fire. The inside of the car erupts into a ball of flame engulfing Eightball but fails to fully destroy him when the sprinkler system is deployed. Shortly after Eightball emerges badly burned but still very much alive and mightily pissed off, the other hijackers, with the exception of Bastian, are ambushed and killed by him having now turned fully vampire. Meanwhile, the passengers arm themselves as Nadja convinces them that she wants to help, and they manage to lock Eightball in the hold and secure the plane. 

Bastian in the cockpit informs Nadja that the plane doesn't have enough fuel to reach New York, and that they must soon land or risk crashing. A selfish wealthy passenger dying from an injury caused by being impaled by a runaway drinks trolley releases Eightball wanting to be bitten instead, he kills him and proceeds to turn most of the other passengers into vampires. Farid is caught in the subsequent conflagration and is bitten on the hand. Nadja's quick thinking sees her chop off Farid's hand with an emergency axe at the wrist to stop the spread of the infection. Knowing that the now infected remaining passengers will escape if the plane lands, Nadja makes the decision to sacrifice herself by using the hijackers' explosives to kill them, but the detonator and explosives are located in the planes cargo hold. The crawl space is too narrow for a adult to pass through, so Elias goes himself, but only manages to grab the detonator before being surrounded by vampires. Nadja makes Farid promise to look after him when she's gone before killing and feeding on Bastian. She tries to save her son but is attacked and drained of her blood by Eightball. Just as he lunges for Elias, Farid manoeuvres the plane into the direction of the rising morning sun, causing Eightball to burn and fall to his death.

Elias slices his hand open using his blood to save Nadja's life. When she comes round moments later he tries to embrace his mother but she rejects him and retreats, knowing that her taste for his blood puts him in danger. The plane lands at the RAF base in Scotland, but Drummond ignores Elias and Farid's pleas for help and caution and board the plane looking for survivors, resulting in a bloodbath, as Drummond looks on via bodycam's wondering WTF. Elias escapes from an ambulance taking him away to a hospital and runs back to the plane, seeing his mother now on the ground with other emerging vampires, feeding on a soldier. Knowing that she is too far gone as she runs towards him, he activates the detonator which he had concealed in his teddy bear, causing the whole aeroplane to erupt in a massive explosion killing the other vampires and presumably her too. When Drummond witnesses this and sees Farid run from his captors to locate Elias and finding him the pair embrace, he orders his troops to uncuff and free him. 

'Blood Red Sky' is a mash up of 'Snakes On A Plane' (self explanatory), 'Last Train to Busan' (zombies marauding on a Korean train) and 'From Dusk Till Dawn' (vampires rampaging in a desert roadhouse) so the concept is nothing new here, but there still remains lots to like about this suspenseful action horror offering including the fast paced action, the blood and gore and a few emotional heartfelt moments between mother and son. On the down side however, there are very few surprises here, there are genuinely no scares to keep you on the edge of your seat or biting your nails, it is just a little repetitive in places and the run time at two hours is probably twenty minutes too long. This film will keep aficionados of the genre entertained for sure, and even if you're on the fringe then it's worth a look just to see a seven year old, clearly much older than his tender years indicate, defy all the odds, repeatedly kick ass, thwart them pesky vampire types, kill his own bloodsucking mummy and be one of only two survivors from the whole plane load of passengers, crew and hijackers.

'Blood Red Sky' merits three claps of the Odeon Online clapperboard from a possible five claps.

    

-Steve, at Odeon Online-