Warning!!! Pedophile Released

This film had so many situations that resonated with me. I am a psychiatric nurse and many of my clients have had similar life experiences and have walked the same path. Shane Ryan does a great job of probing into the life of a girl who has been kicked out of everywhere and disrespected by everyone. A few things could have been done better (shaky cam is for vomiteers) and some of the acting was amateurish from the support staff (the leads were good; Miss Kai is a gem). Someone said his lines and then looked at the person whose turn it was to speak next. Argh! It's not as bad as flicking a look at the camera but things like that make me nuts.

Don't waste your time and don't be fooled by the title.

This "movie" has the worst camera work I have seen:hand-held (indie filmmakers invest in a tripod, please !).

The sound is taken from the production tapes.

And the color grading is weird and crap.

It is like a student film than a movie.

I'm guessing some people would see this banned from it's title alone but it's worth a look passed the "P" word before those people find themselves too outraged. This film was rated at 7.7 when I first found the page today - I'm guessing as sometimes happens the cast, crew and their moms all sign in and hit the 9* rating at first then the voting settles to a more realistic level.

For a first film attempt on what seems to be minimal budget this wasn't too bad. I can't decide if employing a title like they did was part of a promotional gimmick to get the film some attention - which of of course works a treat in our current, media frenzy era over this subject - or if they truly wanted to touch on a topic many larger film outfits would run a mile from. Apparently the two lead characters penned most of the script and it does a fair job of covering some of the basic issues that would be encountered in a situation where a male had been accused of underage sex with his girlfriend and the fallout post-jail.

Read basic as meaning just that - the film's script doesn't reveal the complexities and depth of the issue to any real degree - it seems instead they left it to the acting and long, mostly silent scenes following 'Echo' around to do that job for them. How well it achieves that result I'm unsure. Some of the scenes and effects worked well but there was constant over use and over emphasis of the shaky hand-camera viewpoint - shakes and scene blur movement when you just didn't need and and really didn't want it - I felt like turning away for a break on occasions. On top of that there were some bizarre choices of music... everything from rave beats to a long scene with a minimalist discordant piano.

I gave this 5 out of 10. I'd loved to have given it higher for a couple of young, new actors daring to tackle the topic on zero budget. However for me it didn't work - there's way too much made of the aimless (supposedly aimed at atmosphere and character empathy I guess) wondering around scenes when that time could have far better been spent highlighting the complexities of what can go wrong within the framework of a possible wrong conviction for underage sexual assault. If you want an informed take on the social/media treatment of this issue - check out Chris Morris's infamous Brass Eye TV series on it. -

Weirdly enough, this is a movie everybody seems to have an opinion about immediately - without even having seen it. But since the title carries the word "pedophile", everybody seems to know what this is about ... and it is not. This movie is about a guy who served time for pedophilia he did not commit, and about his alleged victim, who has waited for him all these years, even if it threw her life into an abyss. And the film doesn't consider this as a statement, but tells its plot as an actual story - and in terms of storytelling, WARNING!!! PEDOPHILE RELEASED shows its ingenuity: So OK, this film has been produced on a shoestring and filmed on hand-held digital camera with only skeletal cast and crew, but it tells its compelling story in a series of greatly set-in-scene, atmospheric images and a rich cinematic language that manages to keep things moving without the use of much dialog - all of which make it hard to find anything similar in modern cinema, as this film is more reminiscent of the neorealist movement from decades ago than anything else, without ever becoming a rip-off or an unimaginative homage though. Apart from its self-assured direction, the film is also beautifully carried by Kai Lanette's (intentionally) unglamorous yet spot-on performance, which makes her, a woman in her 20's, believable even as a twelve-year-old. In a nutshell, this film is a triumph of independent, no budget cinema.

The review I just read after watching this movie was fairly accurate but I think the reviewer, David, gave credit for the wrong reasons. I don't particularly care if it's someone's first film or their fiftieth. A bad movie is a bad movie. In my opinion this can hardly be called a movie. There's really no discernible storyline. The very little, largely one-sided dialog is strained and strange. Lack of a budget can't account for a bad script. This seems like it was conceived and written in about an hour on a cocktail napkin. It's obviously a sick person who writes a scene where a girl sitting completely naked on the toilet has an argument with her roommate about who's going to kick the naked girl's brother out of the house and then she walks out there buck naked and fights with him without anyone even thinking it's strange that she's standing there fully nude screaming at her brother to get the eff out of the house while there doesn't seem to be any sort of reason she couldn't have taken the time to get dressed first. Just a ridiculous way to get a nude scene into a movie it seemed to me. But hey, if you're looking for a movie with a lot of nude and rape scenes that it's impossible for a normal person to enjoy, then this movie's for you! The only reason I watched it in the first place was because it had an obviously fraudulent high rating on IMDb, and as David said, the only people who would've rated it highly are those directly involved in its creation.

To all those who think this review is poorly written, me included, the movie is much much worse. While I'd like to say I wrote it badly to prove a point, I think I just got brain damage from trying to sit through this nightmare that someone should have taken much more time to write or not have written at all.

If this saves even one person the two hours of their life that I just wasted then this has been my good deed for the day. You're welcome!