The Red

Rippy, or The Red as the title card suggests, is NOT the horror-comedy it's being marketed as. Instead, it's an incredibly dull film that borrows heavily from Jaws but fails miserably at executing any of the key plot points. The tone is inconsistent, and the script is dreadful. Michael Biehn's character swings between cartoonish and trying to channel Robert Shaw, complete with their own cringe-worthy version of the USS Indianapolis scene.

Rather than focusing on the zombie kangaroo-barely featured in the film-we're subjected to a family drama about a cop whose alcoholic father's past is bizarrely glossed over by the whole town. Despite the credits listing a puppeteering team, every kangaroo scene looks like a low-quality video game cutscene with terrible color grading that doesn't match the surrounding shots.

There's nothing redeeming about this film. Don't waste your money-it's a complete lemon with zero entertainment value.

Aka The Red... A remote community in the Australian outback is being hunted by a killer. Young sheriff Maddie struggles to deal with the situation. It gets more shocking when the killer turns out to be a seemingly invincible giant zombie kangaroo.

The premise is dumb. The CGI kangaroo looks dumb. At least, the zombie part has a good ending. This could have been like Cujo or steer fully into camp. There just isn't anything here. None of the characters are that compelling. The sheriff is almost interesting, but I couldn't pay attention to the others. This is a small B-horror that fails to do more.

Actually the trailer tells you the whole movie.

And it is really about some zombie kangaroo who kills a lot of people in the Australian Outback.

It sounds like a hilarious, funny horror comedy you'd enjoy watching and have a good laugh at - but noooo.

The biggest flaw of that kangaroo zombie flick is that it totally wastes that opportunity and tries to be an earnest shocker movie.

But that does not work, because while the movie takes itself way too seriously and tries to scare you, it fails miserably because once "Rippy" the zombie kangaroo enters the scene you can not stop laughing at all. :)

And that's not only because the whole idea is so silly but because they used some very cheap and obvious CGI for "Rippy".

"Look - it's Rippy the zombie kangaroo out of my old computer I made with the help of the book "Cheap CGI zombie kangaroo for dummies" :)

The movie never gets any good it isn't even so bad it is almost good.

Unfortunately it isn't really worth watching.

I almost felt sad for poor ol' Rippy, who desperately tries to scare you, but you always end up laughing about it.

And I was really looking forward to watching a funny, braindead movie with the typical down under humor - but nooo - instead I got "Rippy" the serious serial killer movie about a zombie kangaroo.

Facepalm!

The bizarre tale of a zombie kangaroo terrorising a rural Australian village is told in Ryan Coonan's Australian horror film, which you may also interpret as a dark comedy. The movie, which is primarily set at night in the small town of Axehead, stars Tess Haubrich as Sheriff Maddy, a young police officer attempting to carry on her late father's legacy.

The townspeople are ripped to pieces by a string of horrific incidents just as she is beginning to feel overwhelmed by the demands of her work. Before it's too late, Maddy and her quirky Uncle Schmitty-played by seasoned actor Michael Biehn-must try to halt the zombie attacker. As they investigate, they find that Rippy, a massive undead kangaroo on the loose, is the real culprit. Hold on tight as we embark on this strange Australian journey into the mayhem of the outback with undead kangaroos.

The strange idea alone makes it worth seeing, but the uneven execution makes it unsatisfactory. Rippy the zombie roo can occasionally be legitimately unsettling and unsettling, but the slapstick required to strike a balance between comedy and horror can clash with heavier, more serious components. The mood is continuously changed by this schizophrenic technique, with differing results.

Coonan obviously did his research since Rippy captures the feel of rural Australia. The remote Outback location, complete with dusty country roads and dilapidated farmhouses illuminated by flickering porch lighting, feels genuine. But the erratic CGI is startling and takes us straight out of the eerie countryside. Rippy himself frequently looks more like a rubber Halloween costume than a realistic zombie. Any sense of menace is undermined by the floating fakeness when he punches or rushes with teeth and claw. It's also unfortunate because gore effects that use real makeup were not bad.

Gave it a half star extra for being an Australian film...

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.