About fifty percent of what Shane Ryan and Alter Ego Cinema has put out there has been pretty damn good and I've boasted about it almost endlessly because Ryan and his company have a nice grasp on the line between arthouse and grindhouse altogether; I thought "Amateur Pornstar Killer" was great while its sequel vastly superio. "Warning!!! Pedophile Released," however, is a huge stumble not only for Shane Ryan but for co-star Kai Lanette, both of whom take two hours to tell a story that could very well have been told in ninety minutes or less. The reason why Ryan's films have been mixed is because often time he's too caught up in style and camera tricks and not focused enough on story and character and that can result in this rather tedious picture. When Ryan is engrossed in the pretension of the arthouse genre, he can really tell a compelling story and that's not the case here. For almost one total hour, we have to endure endless sequences of star Lanette walking around, getting raped, walking around, going to school, walking around, vomiting, walking around, and crying for reasons that are never quite indicated until we get to meet Malachi.

I spent most of the movie thinking "Did we really need to see that?", "What's the point of that?", "Why is she doing that again?" Meanwhile Ryan can never quite decide what style of filmmaking he wants to put on camera. He goes for the feature film presentation on some scenes, then resorts to dizzying hand held cinema verite style, then jumps in to black and white sequences for no peculiar reason, then sometimes seems to be showing Echo's emotions through a gritty handheld camera that is just awkward to witness, the entire time I'm wondering why this story took two hours to tell when if crunched down to ninety minutes, it'd be much more compact and paced. Finally when we get to meet Malachi it's awfully comical as he explains on video confessionals that he touched Echo but didn't touch her, he knows what he did was wrong but it was right, and I'm still wondering here why we need to focus on these characters when there's not too much about them that's likable at all. And it's also never confirmed if this is a compilation of short films with the same story, or just a series of segments. It's awkward and often times much too confusing to enjoy. I did appreciate what kind of turmoil and emotion and Ryan was ultimately pushing for, but my general deduction is that we didn't need so much artsy nonsense to tell what is essentially a story worthy of being a very interesting romance thriller, and in the end I'm still hoping we can see a story like this in the future without the flashy camera work that really adds very little to the overall product.

Somewhere buried beneath the stylish photography and dim cinematography there is a really twisted story about two lovers with vastly different ages willing to do whatever it takes to be together and with less intent to look cool instead of keep audiences compelled, Ryan could have pulled it off and with "Warning!!! Pedophile Released" he doesn't. To put it frankly, this is arthouse dribble with a grindhouse sugar coating.

• For more information on "Warning!!! Pedophile Released," visit the official website.