This week, Son and Foe’s access to pre-release rental titles was unexpectedly curtailed, so you will now have the pleasure of hearing about one of the most bizarre, interesting, and straight-up-fucking-cool movies I’ve seen in quite a while: it’s an independent low-budget dealie that goes by the name “Land of College Prophets,” and it’s absolutely amazing.

The plot to the movie goes thusly: there are a group of individuals known as college prophets, who are smart (hence college) and violent as all-get-out (hence prophet–I guess). Their deeds are many and legendary, but amongst the most legendary is… the story of this movie, which revolves around a guy named Tommy and a guy named Rye.You’re rolling your eyes now, aren’t you? Here’s the thing: Tommy and Rye have a falling out over a girl named Bells, and in the process they accidentally re-awaken the Well That Ate Children. In case you could not guess from the name, this is a Bad Thing. This well causes all sorts of problems that are quite apocalyptical in scope, and it’s up to Tommy and Rye–along with whatever aid they can muster–to save the universe.

I was just about to type “This sounds like your typical B-movie” but no, you can’t even diss it that much. It sounds like an insane B-movie. Here’s the thing: it pretty much is an insane B-movie, but it’s much better than the wacked out B-movies that we’re all familiar with. For one thing, the writing is top-notch. To the point that I had the recurring thought, “My god, this would be the greatest short story ever,” throughout most of the film. There’s so much exposition-via-voiceover going on that it makes the movie seem even more like a B-movie than it would normaly. It is a B-movie, so that’s not a problem for the flick, but it would have been an A-list short-story–the expository methods that seem clumsy on-screen work absolutely perfectly on paper.

So what would have been an absolutely perfect work of short-fiction that Sturgeon himself (or at least Kilgore Trout) would have been proud of, translates into a movie that shows its budget but still delights the viewer. The actors are a cut above the typical “filmed-by-a-wannabe-auteur crap” that generally gets put out by people with no budget, and the cinematography bounces back and forth between pro-looking and the upper-end of amateurish.

If you’re a fan of Lovecraft, or even of Sturgeon, you must check this movie out. It’s brilliantly eccentric, and there’s enough world-building in it to give the story an almost epic fee. Rarely has a film been so close to capturing the experience of reading a great, off-the-wall work of fiction.