Blood Red Sky starts at a level ten within the first five minutes of its overly long two-hour runtime. It is quick; it is snappy, and the foot never seems to ease off of the gas. But for as intense and chaotic as its introduction is, the film quickly puts its foot on the brakes as it attempts to backtrack how a plane ends up being escorted by Scotland yard and military personnel. That is only the start of the many flaws found within the film as it cannot keep the momentum fresh and alive.
For starters, the talent and the production design of this film are mostly great. The cinematography is sleek, and the overall setup is quite intriguing. They did a solid job at sucking the audience into its story; however, the film cannot deliver its promise of getting back to the same level of intensity it opened up with. I blame most of that on the need for a backstory that could have been cut almost entirely. It’s one thing for a film to backtrack to explain how the characters got themselves in a predicament, but it’s another when you have to backtrack past the initial backtrack point itself. It makes the story feel redundant and dragged out. Unfortunately, that’s the circumstance Blood Red Sky finds itself more than once throughout its runtime. Perhaps the backstories served a purpose to establish the mother/son dynamic; another could argue that it actually added nothing at all.
The overall plot is pretty straightforward and brings new opportunities to expand the vampire genre in ways that we haven’t seen before. And while the core of the story gives us a fun set to play with, such as a hijacked plane that is full of passengers with a secret vampire aboard, the film struggles to keep its premise from feeling like recycled material as the filmmakers try to stretch an hour and a half story into two hours of melodramatic vampire lore. And it’s not so much as the story itself being unbelievable, I mean we are talking about vampires here, but it’s more about how in such an absurd setting that even the characters themselves make moronic decisions that exemplify the flaws within the script’s balance.
Not only does Blood Red Sky bounce back and forth in terms of the time frame in the story, but it does the same thing with its usage of locations. There are only so many places you can hide inside a plane, but there are definitely more than a few times when it introduces set pieces that defy the logic of the story and its characters, yet they kept returning to said areas on the plane that leaves us scratching our head. Its odd pacing makes those scenes feel forced and more convoluted than they already are. The biggest frustration of the constant location jumps is we never get a good idea of what the plane’s layout is, and far too often one location would look similar to another. So, when the action finally becomes action-packed with blood-soaking horror, it gets lost amid the chaos and uncertainty of where we are actually watching the action unfold.
Although the climax of the film is quite entertaining (idea-wise), it also feels off-putting due to how long the flight of the movie is to get there. The writing hinders excitement that feels like is within reach. And just as we saw the glimpse of hope, of excitement, the film quickly retracts and bores itself with cliches it tried so hard to subvert. Not even watching the downfall of the villain is satisfying to watch. It should have been because they were the most annoying and despicable character in the movie.
On a biased note, any movie or TV show that depicts animal cruelty for the sake of trying to be the next “edge-lord of filmmakers” gets points taken away automatically—especially when the aftermath is shown as means of a shock value. Unfortunately, Blood Red Sky falls under this and the sequences happen early on. There are no justifications. It’s not shocking. It is poor storytelling for lack of better words. Again, it’s one of the many moments where one has to question the motivation of the direction and writing, and even then there are obvious alternatives that would help not only avoid the scenes but help the pacing and story as well.
Overall, Blood Red Sky fails to exceed its promises, and the experience is anything but thrilling. The two-hour runtime is an exaggeration of a story that should and most definitely could have been told in an hour and a half at most. The film tries too hard to dramatize a relationship between a mom and son, but their connection feels non-existent by the time the credits roll. Instead of getting a bloody vampire movie, we are left with something that is more soul-sucking than the vampires are themselves. By the end, the whole premise, which feels fun and innovative on paper, comes off as comical and absurd. I’ll take the next flight, please.
