We’ve seen Samuel L. Jackson battle limbless reptiles in Snakes on a Plane, watched Harrison Ford kick ass as the president in Air Force One, enjoyed Wesley Snipes foiling a sky high terrorist plot in Passenger 57, followed Kurt Russell trying to resolve an airborne hostage situation in Executive Decision and scratched our heads as Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk till Dawn morphed from a crime thriller into a gonzo vampire movie halfway through.
If you put all of those titles into a blender, add a generous lashing of blood and dump it on top of a surprisingly emotional mother/son story, then you’ve got Blood Red Sky, Netflix’s latest smash hit original film. The streamer is gaining a well-deserved reputation as the place to be for high concept genre mashups, and Peter Thorwarth’s bloodsucking adventure at 30,000 is the latest in a long line of wild ideas to have become instant audience favorites.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Blood Red Sky was destined to top the most-watched charts just 24 hours after premiering on Friday, and as you can see from the reactions below, subscribers everywhere have been enjoying the slick, stylish and occasionally ultra-violent hybrid of horror and thriller.
It’s a bold move to take a concept that’s been done to death in action cinema like the ‘plane is hijacked in midair by terrorists’ setup and then use it as the basis for a vampire story, but Blood Red Sky makes it work. It’s not a perfect movie by any means, but it’s a damn fun one nonetheless, and it’s even better that the ending is as definitive as can be in an age where anything with a unique premise tends to close on a blatant sequel-baiting note.