Blood Red Sky, aka Vamps on a Plane

I’m going to upend my current review structure because rules are made to be broken and begin with my overall feelings about the movie:

I don’t like it.

It’s not a bad movie. It’s not really even unlikeable enough to rag on, and not silly enough to make fun of. It’s a decent movie. But I just don’t like it. There are several reasons as to why, but there’s one main reason:

You can’t just like, frame a pitbull for murder and expect me to root for you. But before I get too deep into spoilers, let’s get the procedural stuff out of the way.

Official Synopsis:

When a group of terrorists hijacks an overnight transatlantic flight, a mysteriously ill woman must unleash a monstrous secret to protect her young son.

The premise is as straightforward as a premise can be: a single mother struggling with an addiction is flying with her son to a treatment center when their airplane is hijacked, which sends her into withdrawal with deadly consequences to everyone around her.

The Metaphor:

Option One: This is a super low-hanging fruit metaphor for addiction if you take the mother as the protagonist of the story. (I’ll address this weird caveat in a second, don’t worry.)

Her son describes her as having an illness; she takes medication to suppress an unbearable urge, which she shoots up in the airport just to be able to get through the flight. We see in a flashback that she has left her toddler alone in an apartment for hours while she has been out scrounging to satisfy her addiction. We get the picture of a mother who is doing her best to cope in the wake of her husband’s sudden and tragic death. When she returns to the place where her husband was murdered, where she became infected, we are better able to see the dank, secluded cabin littered with signs of addiction. There are no answers for us there, other than the addiction needs to be eradicated. She faces herself in the mirror and decides that she will not be a monster, hence the removal of her eyeteeth (which, not gonna lie, made me squeal because I hate me some teeth stuff in movies).

When she does later relapse into her addiction, it’s to the detriment of literally everyone around her. I mean it: no one makes it out unharmed. Blood Red Sky frames it in such a way that she is practically forced to embrace her addiction in order to survive. But I cannot stress enough the thoroughness of the unintended collateral damage: Literally, everyone is harmed by this.

I do think that we’re supposed to take it as, Well these people were going to die a pointless death in a terrorist attack anyway…but I think that just goes to highlight the selfish tunnel vision of addiction. In this case, the addiction takes the passenger seat to this mother’s desire to keep her son safe. She will let everyone around them suffer and die, she will take as many lives as she has to - she’ll even sacrifice herself so that her son is safe. While this parental instinct is usually easy to frame as admirable, I think Blood Red Sky has managed to use it in an insistent, terrifying way that mirrors the addiction more than it does a mother’s love for her child. So while I’m not too keen on the idea that it was her addiction that allowed her to save her son in the end by giving her the strength and endurance to make it through the most harrowing moments of her life - I get why they did it if this is the metaphor they’re going for. By the End of Blood Red Sky, her addiction has ruined the lives of everyone around her, and she succumbs to its muddled depths to the point where she no longer recognizes her own son.

Option Two: Illness

At this point in our medical capabilities, I think it’s hard for any one of us to see a woman with her head completely hairless and not think Cancer. Like the addiction signifiers, the metaphor for illness can be basically interchangeable here. Except that it’s more along the lines of Annihilation’s Bear interpretation of Cancer: that an illness can destroy someone so completely that by the end, all that’s left of them, all that is passed on to live in memory, is a tragic misrepresentation of who they were. Unrecognizable and not even cognizant of their previous relationships or desires, they are lost to their illness.

Option Three: A Mother’s Toxic, Overbearing, Love

Pictured: Mommy Dearest

Ok, this may be a bit of a reach, but if we’re not reaching, what are we doing? Settling for the low-hanging fruit only??

What if the protagonist isn’t the mother? Although the camera follows the mother around and we see what she sees, all of this is framed as the boy remembering what happened. The story is bookended with him. So if this is his story, why is all of the attention, all of the drama, surrounding the mother?

Because that’s what narcissists are like.

Here’s the thing:

You can’t just frame a pitbull for murder and expect me to root for you.

Blood-thirsty mommy drops herself down into the cargo hold after being shot. We hear dogs barking. The dread sets in because you know what that means. There’s a pitbull in one cage, and a Yorkie in another. For a moment, it seems like it was just a “just kidding we’re not going to go there” tease - then nope she cracks open that Yorkie like a Capri Sun and laps the blood from the floor. Not even all of the blood- I guess just enough to make it until one of the hijackers comes down. She’s then able to crush his throat and take her fill. When a different hijacker comes down to check on his buddy, it’s shown that the pitbull has been let out of his cage. So we have tiny dead Yorkie, big dead guy, and a non-aggressive, not barking pitbull looking sweetly up at the hijacker. Two gunshots ring out.

So, what the fuck is up with that? It would have worked as symbolism for her transformation had they just had her down there with the dogs, freaking them out. Then she could have bitten the first hijacker and played it out the same way. Hell, if they wanted a dead dog so bad, they could have released the pitbull and had one of the hijackers shoot it - so that it remains clear who the bad guy is.

But I think this is a movie about a bad guy and a group of worse guys.

This mommy is no good.

I think that our main protagonist and hero is the little boy.

Blood Red Sky presents us with a child who is smart and slightly more mature than his years not because he is self-sufficient but because he has a dependent. While the movie insists that the narrative is that of a mother protecting her son, what we see is a son doing his best to keep his mother together.

And the fact that she is shot to death to protect her son - bravo. That’s the martyr complex that narcissist parents love to take on. Giveth me my thorn of crowns, for how I am willing to suffer for you.

Elias is consistently punished for any actions he takes to preserve himself and his mother. He is not allowed any agency beyond what his mother tells him to do for her. Go to the airport alone and check our bags? Fine. But let him speak to a stranger in the waiting area? She clutches him so tightly that you’d think he was in danger from anyone else but her at this point. She constantly reassures him that she’s going to get better. But during the transition phase, she can’t help but revert back to her core self: a life-force-sucking monster.

Anyone who has ever had to deal with these types will understand. And if you haven’t, please continue to live your life in the sunshine and stay from those that thrive in the shadows of humanity. Because although his mother can put on a good face, within, she is a monster.

Blood Red Sky is a monster movie about a boy witnessing his overly dependent mother completely unravel. It is not a question that she loves him, but rather that her love is so toxic as to cause destruction and chaos to the world around him. When faced with a threat, she practically self-destructs. Ultimately, the story is concluded when Elias sees that in order to save himself, he has to cut all ties with his monstrous mother. Over the ordeal, he has found a parental figure in Farud. He has developed some agency that allows him to make decisions for himself. There is guilt involved with this kind of relationship - it’s the basis for it - but we can agree that Elias will be much better off without his mother. This is Elias’ story about how he was forced to sever his ties with his mother who, in the absence of a parental partner, focused all of her forceful attention on her son. In the end, the final sacrifice wasn’t hers to make: it was Elias’.

Honestly, I think this is a deeper read than anyone has done or will do of Blood Red Sky. It works for me because I can’t make a dog-killer into someone I want to succeed. I understand the medical condition of addiction, I understand the horrors of illness - but I wouldn’t be able to excuse dog-killing behavior in, well, anyone. When Rocco accidentally splattered the cat in Boondock Saints, you subconsciously knew that it would be just a matter of time before he got his. Because it’s not how you establish a good guy. So, in my eyes, this mother isn’t as good as she thinks she is, and she obviously doesn’t give a damn about what anyone else thinks about how she’s looking out for her son. Wouldn’t it have been better for him to stay with a friend while she was leaving to get this treatment? Shouldn’t this bright young boy be in school? Does he even have any friends? Is he allowed to? Or does she isolate him, keep him to herself because of her own insecurities? Does she cling to him because she doesn’t want him to ever leave her? If she already has identified herself as the biggest threat in his life - why hasn’t she done anything to let him have a life away from her? There is something secretly sinister about her dependency that has nothing to do with her fangs.

In any case, there’re too many motherfuckin Vamps on this motherfuckin plane. 2/5, would not watch again.