The Red

To think I spent $11.20 on my Uber trip on All Hallows Eve to get to Limelight Cinemas just to support the Australian film industry by watching "The Red" also known stateside as "Rippy".

It was more laughs and for all the wrong reasons than horror I experienced during this almost 90 minutes screening.

The facts is some third world countries are making better horror movies than the so-called lucky country, Australia, in 2024.

Russell Mulchays' "Razorback" was a better monster horror movie and it was made 40 bloody years ago before CGI.

No, this movie relied on puppeteers in a Roo costume to scare us...what a joke!

No ones going to have a moviegasm watching "Rippy" the darn big bush kangaroo chomp his way through the imaginary mining township of Axehead.

One of the filmmakers biggest mistakes was revealing the zombie marsupial only seconds into the movie.

Clearly the word suspense isn't in their Funk & Wagnalls.

Made on a paltry 7.5 million dollar budget (costume budget for Olivia Rodrigo's World Tour) it showed.

Just like "Razorback" we had to hire an American for one of the lead roles to sell this OS.

Michael Biehn ("Aliens") as "Schmitty" is supposed to be a broken down Vietnam veteran, even though my math has him as 15 years of age in 1971 as he recounts his war stories.

"Rippy" had the chance to be scary and humorous, but under first time feature film director Ryan Coonan, failed on both counts.

Even though it's based on a short he created called, "Waterborne".

This treatment needed a few more drafts before being green lit.

"The Red" or as the Germans say whilst eating sauerkraut "Das Killerkangaru" was filmed in Queensland: around Brisbane, Cracow and Old Petrie Town.

At least these towns might benefit from the handful of film location tourists who follow this stuff.

"The Red" also lacked a killer soundtrack, which I might just make a Spotify playlist for, because I can...full of Aussie bangers (code for hits).

Zombie Roo "Rippy" was no ordinary bush kangaroo and when Rippy goes "Rogue" (another better Aussie horror flick) all hell breaks loose and you don't want to be a runner or a drunk miner after dark.

The trailer contains the best 2 minutes of this horror flick.

The towns cop gives birth to a genius plan in the final showdown, "I'm gonna blow the fu&@ers brains out!" Why that would work when guns and bullets have been useless till now amused me.

Wouldn't you be better to use an old axe hanging in the Fire &Axe pub?

The working title for "The Red" was "Zombieroo" according to Biehn, but that doesn't make it any better because this movie takes itself way too seriously and misses the campy horror cult flick it could have become.

Instead it's relegated to the skinny decaf cappuccino or why bother basket.

It's not even a "so bad it's good film".

Continuity is a disaster, the script blows chunks and First Nations actor Aaron Pedersen couldn't save it.

My love of Zombie movies is prolific, but this was a missed opportunity.

Shame because I was rooting for another great Australian camp fire story for future generations to enjoy too!

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.

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.

Of course I had to sit down and watch the 2024 horror comedy "The Red" (aka "Rippy") when I stumbled upon it by random chance. I mean, a horror comedy with zombie kangaroos, that just sounds like a blast, especially if it was going to be anything like the 2006 horror comedy "Black Sheep" or the 2014 "Zombeavers".

Writers Richard Barcaricchio and Ryan Coonan certainly had an interesting concept for the movie here, but ultimately the storyline proved to be bland, lackluster and generic. So it wasn't as if the writers revolutionized the horror genre, nor bring anything new to the genre, aside from zombie kangaroos; but those you hardly get to see, so... I found the narrative boring and uneventful, and it was a disappointing movie to sit through, to be bluntly honest. I wanted to like "The Red", I really did, but there just wasn't anything to win me over.

While "The Red" is listed as a horror comedy, I have to say that the movie was frightfully devoid of anything funny. So this was actually straight up a horror movie. A bit disappointing actually.

Initially I was thrilled to see that the movie had Michael Biehn in a leading role. In fact, he was actually the only face on the screen that I was familiar with. I will say, however, that the acting performances in the movie were good. Personally I don't get why they opted to go for Michael Biehn for this role, as his American accent sort of clashed with the rest of the Australian accents from the other performers.

Visually then the movie was not particularly impressive. Most of the scenes take place in the dark, and director Ryan Coonan rarely lets you see anything that involves the zombie kangaroos. Another disappointment, to be bluntly honest. That whole thing with keeping scenes in the dark and leaving the imagery up to the audience belongs in the 1980s. When I sit down and watch a horror movie, of course I want to see the gory mayhem and the creature effects. I will say, that the little gore that was in "The Red" was actually good, and it helped lift up the movie a notch.

All in all, I found "The Red" to be a big disappointment. But I am sure that there should be an audience out there for a movie such as this. This is not a movie that will find its way back to my screen a second time.

My rating of director Ryan Coonan's 2024 movie "The Red" lands on a generous four out of ten stars.

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.