Once upon a time, way back in the 1980s, I had a calico cat named Rippy. She got that name because the day she was brought home, she ripped up everything in sight with her claws. She was never a contented kitty, running away twice in her short time in the household, with effect the second time. I never saw her again, but I always kept an eye out in the neighborhood for a surly stray with a mean set of claws. What does that have to do with Rippy, the Australian monster flick from 2024? Not a damn thing.
Directed by Ryan Cooman from a screenplay by Coonan and Richard Barcaricchio, Rippy tells the story of a small town in Queensland, Australia, that is being terrorized by a giant, red kangaroo.
The town is an idyllic place, with neat houses and a pristine pub around which all townsfolk revolve. If things look a little too perfect, that’s because the town was played by Old Petrie Town, an Aussie theme park that preserves a prototypical early 20th century village.
Main players are Tess Haubrich as Maddie, the local cop; her aunt Donna (Angie Milliken), pub proprietress; and Schmitty, Donna’s eccentric and hermit-like ex-husband, curiously played by Michael Biehn.
Rippy goes through townsfolk quicker than Bruce went through tourists in Amityville. It’s up to Maddie to gather a crew and deal with the problem, but Rippy seems impervious to bullets. It’s a savage creature, killing any person or animal it comes across on sight. It is also one of the worst monsters one will see in a movie like this. The budget for Rippy was 
around seven and a half million bucks, and it looks like barely any of it was spent on the CGI. Rippy is 100% a computer render, despite practical effects being used well throughout the movie. The model of Rippy looks like a first pass in post-production as a guide for the actual, detailed work later. There are Asylum flicks that have more believable CGI than Rippy. Rippy looks so bad, in fact, that it must have been a shock to cast and crew when they finally saw the film on which they worked so hard, and it all fell apart because of the poor CGI.
It really is something that ruins the film. It’s not as if this would have been a masterpiece with some proper creature effects, but if it had come close to the workaday professionalism of the rest of the film, it would have done wonders for overall quality. This kind of woeful CGI would have been much more at home in a horror comedy or something bad but self-aware. This movie has a serious tone that is sabotaged by Rippy’s amateurish appearance, making the film deserve the 4.2 rating it has on IMDb.
If this film had a decent looking monster, I would consider it just another mediocre creature feature. Not bad, not all that good, either, but it will do in a pinch. The CGI, all by itself, takes a passable movie and turns it bad. For shame. Rippy takes over the #295 spot in the Watchability Index from Paganini Horror.