Rippy should have been Australia's answer to Cocaine Bear-a wild, blood-soaked, tongue-in-cheek marsupial massacre. Instead, it hops straight into the realm of the forgettable, weighed down by cringe-inducing earnestness, limp storytelling, and a complete lack of self-awareness.
Ryan Coonan's kangaroo slasher arrives with a killer concept: a jacked-up joey goes rogue in the Outback. Sounds like campy gold, right? Wrong. Instead of leaning into the absurdity, Rippy insists on dragging viewers through a desert of maudlin backstory, family trauma, and dead-serious exposition. You'll spend 85% of the runtime wondering if someone accidentally swapped the script with an abandoned Outback soap opera.
Tess Haubrich plays Maddie, a haunted sheriff with daddy issues so cliché they should've come with a warning label. The film opens with her narrating her dead father's legacy like a eulogy from a bad Hallmark movie. It doesn't get better. The emotional weight is forced, unearned, and entirely unnecessary in a film about a murderous kangaroo.
Michael Biehn, bless him, is the only one who understands the assignment. Playing Schmitty, a deranged, bathrobe-wearing bush prophet, he twitches, rants, and throws himself into the ridiculousness with abandon. Unfortunately, the script abandons him, leaving him stranded in a movie that's too embarrassed to be what it should've been: fun.
The kills? Meh. The gore? Minimal. The jokes? Non-existent. Not even a single half-decent pun-no "roo the day," no "marsupial mayhem," not even a cheeky nod to Skippy. When your monster is a murderous kangaroo, you owe the audience at least some wink-wink carnage. But Rippy squanders every opportunity to lean into Ozploitation chaos.
By the time the film finally delivers a campy one-liner in the closing minutes, it's too little, too late. You don't make a killer kangaroo movie and spend 90 minutes pretending you're making Mystic River.
