Stars Summer Glau, Ryan Kwanten and Steve Zahn go LARPing in director Joe Lynch's Knights of Badassdom.

A word of advice for those headed to Comic-Con this weekend: Don’t stand too close to Joe Lynch — you might get struck by lightning. The director has gotten so lucky in the last few days it’s possible the movie gods may strike him down out of spite.

The film is also in possession of the world’s best and/or nerdiest title: Knights of Badassdom.

“To be totally honest, everyone thinks we designed this, like we had some kind of Ryan Kavanaugh-esque equation where if we plugged in this, plus this, plus this, equals this, times this and boom! you got a movie that’s going to kill at Comic-Con — that is so not the case,” Lynch said in an interview with Wired.com, discussing the fortuitous timing of the Knights of Badassdom panel and Q&A Saturday in Hall H. “I honestly have to chalk it up to movie magic; the cinema gods were looking down on us.”

Divine intervention also might’ve had something to do with getting Lynch the director’s chair in the first place. Badassdom’s producers originally approached John Landis about making the film. But when the Animal House director told them he didn’t want to do the picture, he also told them they should look into this other guy — a young filmmaker who had just given him a cameo (see below) in one of a series of videos created with Adam Green (Frozen) for the 2008 FrightFest film festival in the United Kingdom.

“He loved those shorts so much and he was showing them to everybody…. That’s how I got in the door,” Lynch said. “He’s been kind of my godfather on this movie.”

A little bit of a godfather, a little bit of a tease. When Landis returned to FrightFest the following year and told the story of putting Lynch up for the gig, he called out the director from the stage, saying, “I recommended Joe, and he got the job, and he starts shooting in October…. Don’t fuck this up, Joe.”

Film fans will get a better idea of how well Lynch did Saturday, but the production stills alone look pretty promising.

So why are nerds atwitter over Badassdom? It probably has something to do with the premise.

The “comedy, horror, fantasy, adventure mashup,” as Lynch calls it, is about a guy named Joe (Kwanten) who loses his girlfriend and job just as his band is hitting the skids. To cheer him up, his friends take him on a LARPing weekend. That alone seems cool, but when you add the twist that somewhere along the line another friend, played by Steve Zahn, comes along with an eBay-purchased book of necromancy and summons a real-life succubus, it becomes just ridiculous (in a good way).

‘Everybody is just freaking out, in the best way possible.’

The film won’t be out until spring 2012, Lynch said. It’s been in the works since before Dinklage was nominated for an Emmy for his portrayal of Tyrion Lannister on that other swordplay powerhouse Game of Thrones, and probably before most people stateside associated Kwanten with upcoming superhero movie Griff the Invisible.

The timing couldn’t be more perfect for Lynch’s relatively small indie picture to go up against huge franchises like The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1 at Comic-Con. With such a big-deal cast and the hopes of nerdom now sitting squarely on his shoulders, does Lynch, a Comic-Con devotee for nearly a decade, worry about unveiling his film to the masses, particularly in the giant hall he refers to as “Oz”? Nah.

“Everybody is just freaking out, in the best way possible…. The fact that we’re an indie film and it’s not a remake, it’s not a board game, it’s not an established property, but an original film? It’s amazing,” Lynch said. “Again, I blame either the movie gods or maybe there’s some magic there too.”