Made on a micro-budget, The Land of College Prophets is about an ancient underground guild of costumed, super-hero style fighters who co-exist on campus. It’s a fight club with a healthy dose of liberal arts theorizing, fused with either ironic or creatively obscene one-liners. Though they seem to owe something to Jay and Silent Bob (including the comic book superheroes Jay and Silent Bob are recreated as by Ben Affleck in Chasing Amy), College Prophets has a decidedly literary bent, riddled with quotes from Robert Frost and Albert Einstein instead of Tarantino riffs. If nothing else, this is a dumb cult action flick that presumes to respect your intelligence as a viewer; and if it doesn’t quite work at least it gives a game try.

Tommy (Thomas Edward Seymour), who wears a priest’s collar and delivers sermons on top of a milk crate about God and roadkill, and Rye (Philip Guerette), his army fatigues-wearing partner, are on-campus brawlers when they’re not working mundane jobs in the audio-visual department and the local café. The action-packed epic battle scenes with amplified punch sounds and stylized combat moves, battling their equally larger-than-life enemies (with unsubtle names like Third Reich Jones), are contrasted with these guys sitting around the bar thinking about girls — specifically, Bells (Tina Angelillo), the girl both Tommy and Rye adore.

As their love triangle heats up and the friendship is tested, the campus is plunged into some serious Lovecraft-style hell when the Evil inside The Well That Ate Children is awakened. The College Prophets must band together and unite, even so far as putting aside their differences with their rival brawlers and the S.W.A.T. team style campus security guards. As a plague begins to wipe out the townspeople, the College Prophets decide to do battle against the forces of evil (led by, of course, a demonically possessed Third Reich Jones) and save their town, and maybe the world.

With its tongue planted firmly in its cheek, College Prophets isn’t to be taken seriously. But the cast is committed to their poker-faced line deliveries, and unlike many of the Kevin Smith characters they don’t smugly laugh at their own jokes. The over-reliance on voice over might be irritating if Thomas Edward Seymour weren’t so likeable, in a soft-spoken and unpretentious way. Built like a roughneck but with the demeanor of a coffee house poet, he’s an appealing hero. If College Prophets feels slightly too long and redundant at a scant 83 minutes, it is seen through by how endearing Tommy, Rye, Bells, their eccentric professors, and even their badass enemies are. For all the sci-fi combat, it’s more reminiscent of the dumb things one did in college, and all that earnest grad school theorizing. College Prophets coasts by on its charming qualities and makes for a pleasant diversion.