• Directed by “The Hale Manor Collective” (Mike Aransky, Philip Guerette, and Thomas Edward Seymour)
• Written by Thomas Edward Seymour
• Starring
  • Thomas Edward Seymour
  • Russ Russo
  • Philip Guerette
  • Tina Angelillo
  • Mike Aransky

The Land of College Prophets wants to be seen as an intelligent and deep independent motion picture. Desperately so, in fact. It goes to great lengths to foster that impression of depth, using that old standby of eager-to-impress intelligentsia: Incomprehensible abtuseness. That may work in an art form which relies on brief impact, like poetry, but in a feature-length film, eventually the bones of the underlying structure, or lack thereof, become apparent. This movie gets less and less impressive the further it gets from the opening credits; it really really wants to say something, but beneath the naive pretense of depth, it really has nothing to say.

Or maybe it did, and they simply forgot to say it. The movie seems as if half of the pages of the screenplay were culled or cast to the wind at random, and the remainder were lensed without any regard to the fact that, while cast and crew (and largely, the cast was the crew) know what was contained in the missing pages, the attempt is never made to fill in the gaps for the audience. Questions are left unanswered more often than not, not because the questions are particularly deep or unanswerable or poignant, but because nobody bothered.

“No, it’s your turn to be the Boy Wonder.”

Like the first question that occurs to anyone who sees the title: “What’s a ‘college prophet’?” I dunno. For a bit it seems as if it were a secret organization, like the Skull & Bones but fiercer; by the end, I could only surmise it meant “people who are as grim and self-evidently deep as we are,” or more succinctly, “people we don’t think are dicks.”

The protagonists in question are the narrator Tommy (Thomas Edward Seymour), a buzzcut college student who wears a priest’s shirt with its sleeves ripped off, and Rye (Philip Guerette), who wears paramilitary castoffs (including an armored vest) everywhere. The costuming was evidently meant to show that these two are sincere and committed rebels who seek their own path in the world; what it really shows me is that the filmmakers are still stuck in that vein of undergrad self-regard that lets attention-seekers dress like that and think that they’re thus more “honest” than their parents. Cementing that assessment is Tommy and Rye’s propensity for busting out with random belligerence toward authority figures and random passers-by. That’s not two mature free-thinkers; that’s a couple of overgrown nursery school students who need a nap. Here’s a hint, guys; to lay claim to that whole “speaking truth to power” thing, you’ve first got to get your hands on some truth.

Say, shouldn’t the cinematographer be on this side of the camera?

The third corner of their triangle is Bells (Tina Angelillo), Tommy’s longtime significant other who is nevertheless involved with Rye behind Tommy’s back. Maybe it’s because, while Tommy expends a lot of effort looking tough, Rye can actually hold his own in a brawl. Maybe it’s because while both are macho-poseur dillweeds, Rye at least has a reasonable haircut. Whatever the reason, this betrayal naturally drives a wedge between the friends, so instead of shouting pseudo-revolutionary twaddle at the inferiors around them on campus, they shout them at each other.

And that brings us to the twenty-three-minute mark, at which point something resembling the plot finally makes an appearance. Tommy and Rye have it out at The Well That Ate Children, a folksy-decorated well which has all sorts of unsavory legends attached to it. In the course of their fight, Rye’s blood spatters on the well, there’s a ground tremor, and the evil of the well possesses… neither of them. Instead, it takes over Third Reich Jones (Paul DeSimone), a junkyard worker and bodybuilder who just happens to pass by in time to get some water from the well splashed in his mouth. We’ll only return to Third Reich on occasion, as his skin progressively turns blue, because we have much more important things to deal with, like Tommy shouting at Bells, or Tommy shouting at the faculty members who expect him to do his job in the college A/V department (that’s right, tough guy Tommy is the A/V geek), or Tommy shouting at the dean (Dick Boland) who’s supposed to be this fascist nutcase just because he wants these “College Prophets” to stop throwing blood on the other students.

The Well That Ate Good Taste.

Even on those occasions in which the plot does manage to battle its way to the forefront through all of the other flourishes, it doesn’t know what to do with itself. Thanks to the blood spilt at the well, there’s some sort of miasma of evil taking over the college and the town, mostly seen in the form of people lying around in a stupor. (Why people notice this as unusual for college students is never explained.) Thanks to the friendly Professor Holiday (Carmine Capobianco), a physicist who likes to preaach long sermons on the Law of Karma in class instead of teaching the actual subject, Tommy and Rye manage to patch things up — not soon enough to prevent Bells’ death at the hands of Third Reich, but at least soon enough to come up with a bizarre and nonsensical plan to counter the evil, much of which involves planting saplings at certain places. (All this scene needed was a public-service announcement by the late John Denver: “Plant a tree for your tomorrow…”)

When, O when with the FDA clamp down on these home-circumcision kits?

There are, hidden in the hand-waving, a few moments of visual inspiration. When Rye, overcome by the evil, visits the restroom to pray to the porcelain god, he sees the person in the next stall piss all over the floor — a stream of urine that soon turns to an explosion of blood. And the mask that Third Reich makes for himself, cobbled together from scrap metal and bailing twine, is quite arresting, even if it completes his transformation into a Mortal Kombat character. But all these moments demonstrate is that whatever talent the Hale Manor Collective brought to bear on this movie was all concentrated in crafting visual tableaus; nobody was really in charge of narrative structure, authentic characterizations that aren’t an unwitting self-parody, or themes any deeper than those dwelt on by college freshmen who think they’ve discovered some great truth in their newfound independence because their high school library didn’t have a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Somebody should have told these guys that refusing to make sense isn’t the same thing as being profound, and that naive attempts at undergrad depth aren’t going to be nearly as impressive to an audience which has already moved past the “grim poignant loner” phase of their lives. This film is the equivalent of the underground poetry magazine whose only redeeming virtue is its unfocused enthusiasm, and whose rediscovery in the bottom of a box of textbooks ten years hence will cause the matured once-poet to cringe.

“Finish him!”

I realize that most online reviews for this film range from generally positive to very positive, and most of those other reviewers would probably take me to task for not acknowledging the humor in the movie. There are a few rare moments of comic relief here and there leavening the loaf, but just enough to indicate that the filmmakers had no idea that the more straight-faced parts of the movie are just as ridiculous as the intentional funnies. Instead, the ponderous seriousness and sincerity of the meandering plot and pseudo-deep dialogue lead to giggles when not driving me into a stupor of apathy. College was a great time, Hale Manor guys, but I no longer think that my being there meant that I Had It All Figured Out. Maybe you should move on too.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 11, plus 1 rat
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 2 (one of which was the afore-mentioned rat)
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0