Director – Peter Throwarth, Screenplay – Stefan Holtz & Peter Throwarth, Producers – Christian Becker & Benjamin Munz, Photography – Yoshi Heimrath, Music – Dascha Dauenhauer, Visual Effects Supervisor – Niels Rinke, Visual Effects – Scanline VFX (Supervisor – Falk Buettner), Special Effects Supervisor – Kamil Jaffar, Makeup Effects Design – Mark Coulier, Production Design – Uwe Stanik. Production Company – Rat Pack Filmproduktion/Sirena Film.
Cast
Peri Baumeister (Nadja), Carl Koch (Elias), Alexander Scheer (Eightball), Kais Setti (Farid al Adwa), Dominic Purcell (Berg), Gordon Brown (Bill Morris), Graham McTavish (Colonel Alan Drummond), Kai Ivo Baulitz (Bastian Buchner), Roland Møller (Karl), Chidi Ajufo (Curtiz), Nader Ben-Abdallah (Mohammed), Leonie Brill (Julie Webber), Rutgen Lysen (Todd), Rainer Reiners (Rainer Huber), Ilona Schultz (Ingelore Huber), Petra Michelle Nerette (Steward Gifty), Adriana Altaras (Dr Anna Migaikis), David Huerten (Marvin), Florian Schmidtke (Air Marshall Michael), William Young (Geoffrey), Valerie Vachkova (Alicia), Joerg Bundschuh (Captain), Holger Hage (Air Marshall Holger)
Plot
A Transatlantic Airlines flight is forced to make an emergency landing at an RAF base in Scotland. A young boy Elias is allowed off as soldiers surround the plane, believing that the flight has been hijacked by the Islamic terrorist Farid. Things all began as Nadja and her son Elias boarded a night flight from Germany to New York. Nadja was suffering a medical condition as a result of being bitten while her car was stranded in the middle of nowhere. She was travelling to New York seeking the help of a medical expert. Not long into the flight, armed hijackers took over, forcing Farid, a regular Middle Eastern passenger, to dictate a message that made it appear this was the actions of Islamic terrorists. Nadja was shot but made a recovery from the fatal bullet wounds. Nadja then sank her teeth into one of the hijackers, but this left her unable to hold back her transformation into a full vampire. The hijackers and passengers fled in fear at seeing her emerge. However, the psychopathic hijacker Eightball then took a vial of her blood and injected himself. This led to the vampire infection spreading to the other hijackers and passengers, resulting in bloody chaos aboard the plane.
Blood Red Sky was the fifth film for German director Peter Throwarth who had previously made assorted works in the comedy and action genres with the likes of Bang Boom Bang (1999), If It Don’t Fit, Use a Bigger Hammer (2002), Strike! (2006), Not My Day (2014), The Last Cop (2019) and the subsequent Blood & Gold (2023). Blood Red Sky was shot in a mixture of German and English.
Blood Red Sky could easily come with the capsule description ‘Vampires on a Plane’. The early 2000s brought a spate of airplane thrillers with the likes of Turbulence (1997), Red Eye (2005), Flightplan (2006), Non-Stop (2014) and Mayday (2015). The horror genre leaped on board this with the tongue-in-cheek Snakes on a Plane (2006). This caught on and several other filmmakers tried to offer similar wacky vehicular collusions – The Asylum’s Snakes on a Train (2006), Swarm (2007) with ants on a plane, Silent Venom (2009) with snakes on a submarine, zombies on a plane in Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane (2007), a ghost story on a plane with 7500 (2014) and Flight 666 (2021), Howl (2015) with a werewolf on a train and Lost in the Pacific (2016) with mutant cats on a plane.
The one of these that Blood Red Sky comes the closest to is the South Korean Train to Busan (2016), a full-tilt action film with people trying to fight off zombies as they overrun a train. Blood Red Sky has been conceived as the same but with vampires aboard a plane. It is the only of the films listed above that generates the same full-out action and tension that Train to Busan did. Peter Throwarth does a great job cutting between the various hijackers, passengers and infected both in the build-up and the outbreak.
Mother Peri Baumeister and son Carl Koch aboard the flightPeri Baumeister as a vampire
The film takes its time building up. It is quite some way in before we discover that what we are watching is a Vampire Film – not that such is not difficult to work out from the pre-publicity. During this time, we are distracted by the scenes where the hijackers take over the plane – one where their reasons for doing so are never made clear. During this time, if you did not know otherwise, Peri Baumeister could simply be an ill woman on board who is struggling with her condition.
When Blood Red Sky finally lets its vampire out of the bag about 55 minutes in, it becomes a whole lot more fun. Peter Throwarth racks up great excitement with Peri Baumeister tearing throats out or barricaded in the cockpit. This becomes positively mind-boggling about the point that the film has Alexander Scheer barricaded inside a car in the hold, injecting himself with a syringe of Peri’s blood to transform at the same time as she tries to batter her way into the car, finally breaking a hole in the windscreen and pouring alcohol in to set him alight. In the role of Nadja, Peri Baumeister gives an amazing performance that can swing between concerned mother and ravening animalistic rage with the flip of a coin.
Blood Red Sky as at its most entertaining and full tilt once the vampire infection starts to spread throughout the plane as people are having throats torn out and being converted wholesale. Peter Throwarth directs with this considerable gore-drenched ferocity. What becomes highly entertaining is the abrupt whiplash reversals – where the passengers and hijackers alike are suddenly on the same side fleeing from the vampires, or when the passengers go from trying to kill Peri Baumeister to regarding her as an ally against the now vampirised hijackers. It works surprisingly satisfyingly.
