Blood Red Sky: you'd better buckle up

Kilometres above the Atlantic, between the terrorists who don’t give a damn about human life and a vampire who struggles to control their bloodlust, a little boy desperately clings to his life. When the carnage started, he and his dangerously sick mom were on their way to the USA, hoping to find a cure, but a gang of violent hijackers broke into their plans, waking up a greater evil.

What is it like - to find yourself a hostage on a large airliner together with a hideous creature that can tear you apart in a heartbeat? If you carry inside yourself a lethal weapon that may turn into a weapon of mass destruction, will you use it to save your loved ones? It’s close to impossible to surprise the public with a new vampire movie. We seem to know any possible plot and every possible twist. However, “Blood Red Sky”, British-German action horror film, impressed me hard. While watching the movie, I was on the plane, too, which gave me even more chills. The closed space with very little chance to hide force and the panicking crowd bring you to the edge of panic, too.

“Blood Red Sky”, the movie directed by Peter Thorwarth, doesn’t invent anything particularly new. On the contrary, it turns to the horror traditions of the 80-s and 90-s and an old folklore representation of the vampire. Even the heroine Nadja (Peri Baumeister) and her son Elias (Carl Anton Koch) seem to come from a Slavic country, while the Slavic world is considered the vampire origin.

If you wanted to watch a carnage, you will get it: the filmmakers are generous with violence. The action in this film provides a full-scale emotional rollercoaster: it was hard to control exclamations: “Damn!” and “Hell!” each time someone got killed, the hostages did something stupid or the evil guys get stronger. Unlike movies like “Underworld”, it’s not some dark fairy-tale with exquisite battle choreography, but a bloody, gory sight with the clear message “no one will get out alive”. The vampire in the “Blood Red Sky” is nothing of an upper-class “dark elf” who sometimes savours artificial blood like good old chianti. It’s a ferocious beast that you would never, never want to either meet or become. Besides, the more violent human you were, the more vampirism degrades your own consciousness once you get infected.

On the other side, the flashbacks of the heroes will touch your sentiment with a sad family story, and the mother’s final self-sacrifice will even bring tears to your eyes. I also loved the storyline of Iranian scientist Farid (Kais Setti) who is represented at the start of the film as a possible hijacker.

I want to praise the work of the German actress Peri Baumeister. Her transformation on screen more than once made my heart shrink. However, everyone did a great job and made their characters believable, from Peri’s co-stars Alexander Scheer and Dominic Purcell to Carl Anton Koch who played the little Elias: I believed every second of their fear and pain. One can say that Elias is unnaturally smart for his age, but as we see in the flashbacks, life has been tough on the boy since birth, making him grow up faster.

I tried to find some flaws in this movie, but I honestly cannot, except for the evilest monster’s overwhelming invincibility that far exceeds the norm of his kind, thus damaging the inner logic of the film. However, the temperature of our fear should grow all the time, shouldn’t it?

“Blood Red Sky” has entered my personal “golden collection” of horror movies as a bright European representative of the genre, and this is something worth seeing at least twice. Won't advise it to aerophobic people, though.

My evaluation:10/10