Surely they mean “Outlandish.” This oddball medieval sci-fi movie, about an alien warrior who crash lands in eighth-century Scandinavia—bringing a ravenous dragon-like beastie along with him—would be a risible curiosity even if it were executed with the ultimate in Hollywood pizzazz. But in this case the production is almost quaintly low-rent and the effects amusingly cheesy. The result is something that seems ready-made for a late-night slot on the Sci-Fi channel.

“Outlander” is also burdened with a stolid lead performance by Jim Caviezel as Kainan, the humanoid whose ship crashes in a lake in Norway in 709 A.D. Caviezel’s dour personality is explained in later flashbacks, when we learn that he’s wracked with guilt over what happened after his race had conquered and colonized a planet inhabited by huge lizard creatures called Moorwen, which they’d tried to wipe out. Some had survived and attacked the garrison where Kainan’s wife and son lived, killing all the settlers. Kainan was, in fact, bringing their bodies back to the home world in his lost ship; and what he didn’t know was that a Moorwen had stowed away on board and survived the crash, too.

There’s a hint of “Enemy Mine” in this premise, but “Outlander” goes in a different direction by introducing a large cast of scruffy Vikings to the mix. Kainan, suspected of participating in the annihilation of a village that the Moorwen actually destroyed, is taken captive by aggressive young warrior Wulfric (Jack Huston), who hopes to wed spunky Freya (Sophia Myles), daughter of wise old King Rothgar (John Hurt). But after Kainan proves his mettle by saving Rothgar from a bear and performing well in a balancing-act competition atop shields against Wulfric, he’s accepted into the tribe, and Freya begins to fall for him. Soon everybody—including Rothgar’s initially bloodthirsty rival Gunnar (Ron Perlman), the chief of the destroyed village—is enlisted under Kainan’s leadership to trap and kill the Moorwen. The effort will ultimately take the outlander and Wulfric deep underground on a mission to save Freya from the creature’s clutches, and to Kainan’s being hailed by the locals as one “sent by the gods” (which means a second time for Caviezel in such a role, following “The Passion of the Christ”).

All of this is pretty goofy stuff, but if handled with panache and a touch of grandeur—the way, for example, John McTiernan did with “The 13th Warrior,” with which it obviously shares some outrageous story elements—it might have been similarly good, dumb fun. Unfortunately, the approach taken by writer-director Howard McCain and co-scripter Dirk Blackman ranges from pedestrian to ridiculous, and visually the picture is drab, both in terms of the grubby settings and cinematography by Pierre Gill that emphasizes somber green and blue tones and doesn’t seem to have been very crisply processed. The murkiness is especially noticeable in the subterranean scenes in the last act, which also reveal creature effects by Patrick Tatopoulos that are hardly state-of-the-art.

And as Caviezel’s morose turn suggests, McCain doesn’t draw the best from his cast. Myles and Huston get by on the force of energy alone, but Perlman is allowed to chew the scenery too freely (it’s an approach that works better when he’s buried under “Hellboy” makeup), and Cliff Saunders and young Bailey Maughan are both used too broadly as a comic-relief Viking and a sentiment-begging orphan boy, respectively. In fact the best work comes from veteran Hurt as the wizened ruler; despite being stuck with a braided beard, he delivers even the most laughable lines of dialogue in a dignified manner that ameliorates their absurdity.

In defense of “Outlander,” it’s not exactly dull. But the execution is too prosaic to overcome the essential silliness of it all.