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THE LAND OF COLLEGE PROPHETS - CAPSULE REVIEW
Looking like something out of an alternate universe, THE LAND OF COLLEGE PROPHETS, directed by its key exponents under the banner of the Hale Manor Collective, makes no apologies for being abstruse and evading the conventions we've come to expect from indie cinema. The logic and mood of PROPHETS comes straight out of some kind of primal consciousness (the exponent of said consciousness eventually revealed as a Lovecraftian wishing-well that we appropriately never see during the daytime), in which people seem to be reduced to chemical reactions that must attract/repel/detonate on sight. I guess this is where the college campus comes into play, as there's as much pseudo-science going on as pseudo-witchcraft, leading to a murky storyline that's really pseudo-everything.
The plot is difficult to recount, but plays on the archetypes of combat that turns every character in this story into a video-game avatar - at any point that the script/actors begin to treat these guys as real people it only serves to make things more confusing. Adding to the intangibility of the film is a visual style that is surrounded by darkness and shadows, and the sense that the story is starting in the middle. If any of this sounds offputting, the film-makers try a number of strategies to hold your interest. PROPHETS has minor gross-outs (blood or puking, mainly), humor (from characters, visual gags, one-liners) and plenty of action. Among the constant expository monologues, the timing and delivery in a dialogue between churlish protagonist Tommy (Thomas Edward Seymour) and a timorous professor (Phil Hall) is a comic nugget. Similarly, Russ Russo's "Fightin' Irish" scrapper Joe is hilarious in his brief appearances but would have been more memorable if the film-makers had resisted bringing him 'back from the dead'. There's nothing in this film that leaps out and screams CHEAP! although the budget is obviously shoestring (well, the 'shake the camera' earthquake effects were old hat even when Irwin Allen was doing them on TV) and the performers do unanimously inhabit their roles convincingly.
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