Rippy review – kangaroo slasher bounces into Cocaine Bear territory

Horror drama about a marsupial in the frame for murder brings earnestness and maudlin backstory where none is needed

It is a horror movie truth universally acknowledged that if your killer bounces after its victims, you’d best play it for laughs. But that is something mystifyingly lost on Ryan Coonan’s slasher flick, which appears to have transformed the hench kangaroo meme into a feature-length film. Sadly, Rippy is no antipodean Cocaine Bear; after traversing wastes of maudlin backstory, it waits until the final five minutes before finally delivering some tongue-in-cheek sauce courtesy of a famous marsupial catchphrase.

Outback sheriff Maddie (Tess Haubrich) lives in the shadow of her late, toast-of-the-town cop father, who was also a high-school sports champion and war hero. (She saves us having to work this out by telling us off the bat in voiceover.) When his wild-eyed buddy Schmitty (Michael Biehn) wanders in babbling about a humongous homicidal joey, and two drunks wind up chop-sueyed in the brush, it seems like a case of murders in the ’roo morgue. But, convinced by Schmitty’s ex (Angie Milliken) not to trust his ravings, Maddie homes in on a more rational suspect: an ex-con at the local mine (a brief cameo from Mad Max’s Nathan Jones).

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