Three Films Make A Post: You're in for a shock.

Blood Red Sky (2021): If you want to play cliché bingo with this German Netflix “Die Hard on an airplane with a vampire lady standing in for Bruce Willis” movie, be advised that doing the drinking version might actually kill you. And this abomination directed by Peter Thorwarth (who also co-“wrote”, if that’s the word to use for cribbing this egregious, with German TV veteran Stefan Holtz) really isn’t worth your life. This is the sort of copyist filmmaking that simply can’t get up even an ounce of creative energy, cribbing left and right in the most soulless and joyless manner, ripping off superior movies without the tiniest bit of fun, charm or intelligence but a whole lot of stupidity. Indeed, it’s a movie so stupid, it believes Dominic Purcell is a good casting choice for Die Hard’s John Rickman character, and that it’s tedious repetition of well-worn tropes should scratch on the two hour runtime mark.

On the positive side, it does teach that watching people in vampire makeup running through an airplane does get boring pretty fast.

Jolt (2021): Over at Amazon, Kate Beckinsale is cast as Jason Statham with breasts in a crime action fantasy about a woman so irascible she develops super powers and needs electric jolts to calm herself down hunting down the killers of her prospective boyfriend. It’s also very clichéd, but has a fun, snarky sense of humour and shows some imagination in the way it puts its clichés together. Some scenes show that director Tanya Wexler doesn’t have much experience staging action scenes, but there are just as many that are good bread and butter action fun. It’s a good time right now if you want to see some skulls cracked and balls kicked by a woman (and when wouldn’t you?). I don’t think I exactly need the sequel a surprise Susan Sarandon apparently wants to sell me, but I’d certainly not be set against it completely.

The Scary House aka Das schaurige Haus (2020): Back again at Netflix, we have this Austrian family friendly bit of horror cinema for the YA crowd directed by Daniel Prochaska. You know the drill: after the death of a parent, the rest of the family moves far away into a house in the sticks and encounters ghostly shenanigans caused by a dark secret of the (near) past. The haunting gets resolved, the kids acquire some friends, and some evildoers are punished while the rest of the cast learns a valuable lesson. The film doesn’t treat its material with more originality than the other two flicks in this entry, but Prochaska is pretty good at creating a sense of place for the Austrian village right on the border to Slovenia this takes place in and does deliver some pleasant kid friendly spooks, as well as a couple of effective suspense sequences.

While plot and structure are well-worn, the film takes care to present them with enough conviction they still have weight, so the result is a nice afternoon’s entertainment that features a surprisingly unpleasant backstory – as befits a haunting but isn’t exactly what you’d expect in a movie for the kids these days.