Today, folks, we’ve got something special for you, as the folks at The Asylum sent over a copy of Dragon Crusaders for us. This by itself wouldn’t be so special, until you consider one important fact: I can’t tell what movie they’re ripping off. Thus, it looks like we’ve got something interesting here–original Asylum fare.

Dragon Crusaders takes us out on the open sea, as a group of Knights Templar find themselves up against a band of pirates. Naturally, Knights Templar don’t much care for pirates, and descend upon them with all the fury you’d expect. But when the knights in turn are cursed to take on horrible forms, they find they must take on something much, much worse than they expected in order to break the curse, and by extension, save humanity from a fate only slightly worse than being burned alive–being burned alive and eaten by enormous lizards.

Original Asylum fare doesn’t happen very often these days, with the bulk of their work dedicated to titles that sound vaguely familiar, because, not surprisingly, they are. But sometimes they get something original out, and that’s where the bulk of their best movies comes from. Sure, they have the occasional clunker–who doesn’t?–but give The Asylum some original content, the stuff that hearkens back to their best times when they were just getting started and putting out some really impressive stuff, and they can really show you a good time.

See, Dragon Crusaders is almost disturbingly ambitious. They’re going to have dragons and gargoyles and even zombies–though they call them revenants–in here. Though admittedly, the narrative is a little light on the cohesiveness, it’s not exactly doing a terrible job of getting the point across. And what it lacks in decent narrative structure it will amply make up for with a lot of action. Plenty of swordfights and the like will race across this like no tomorrow.

The question you’ll have to ask yourself, of course, is are you okay with a plot that only half makes sense but will pack in loads of clanging swords and people getting hit with pointy things in a thoroughly medieval fashion? Chances are most will be, and with good reason. Dragon Crusaders is reasonably fun and pretty exciting; flawed, to be sure, but still very exciting.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Dragon Crusaders, as a result, a flawed but still fun six out of ten. It’s certainly one of the more fun pieces I’ve seen The Asylum put out, especially recently, but it’s not without its problems. Though those problems are pretty substantial, it’s still hard to ignore the sheer amound of fun involved in this one.