Los Angeles Times Review On Film Which I'm Executive Producer!

A vivid tale of innocence lost

Behind the lurid-sounding title, "Warning!!! Pedophile Released," lies an ambitious and powerful experimental film written by its stars Kai Lanette and Shane Ryan, and directed, photographed and edited by Ryan.

It is a strikingly visual, deliberately fragmented work of evocative imagery counterpointed by a remarkably effective use of richly varied music.

Except for an occasional flashback, the film is devoid of conventional exposition as it tracks the blighted lives of a 12-year-old girl, Echo, and 18-year-old Malachi, who had formed a tender bond that has landed him in prison for six years for sexual molestation despite both insisting that it never happened.

Unfolding in three parts, the film jumps ahead to find Echo (Lanette) a 15-year-old loner wandering about a partly derelict coastal community, where she is impregnated after a gang-rape and thrown out of the house by her father. By the time she is 16, she is turning the occasional trick, doing drugs and shoplifting but surviving remarkably well, an individual of clear inner strength.

The first two parts, which have a gritty, rambling poetic quality and little dialogue, give way to an explosive final chapter in which the freshly released but unnerved and stigmatized Malachi (Ryan) returns home. Ryan tells little about this couple but reveals much of what they are about by the time the film is over. Lanette and Ryan have created a minimalist work of maximum impact.

-- Kevin Thomas "Warning!!! Pedophile Released." Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 53 minutes. At the Grande 4-Plex, Downtown L.A.