Chances are that a couple of weeks ago you had never heard of the film director Mark Locke, nor his film Crust (2001), which have suddenly become front-page news. It seems that Guy Hands, the chairman of EMI, is suing his tax advisers for advising him (as well as 74 other disgruntled claimants) to invest in a number of films on the basis that, succeed or fail, it would entitle investors to tax relief. Somehow, that didn't happen: a possible £22million mistake for the investors.

The British film Crust is at the centre of the publicity, although it technically couldn't flop here because it was never released. It did, however, get a showing in Japan, where it went right through the roof, inspiring a host of movies of similar ilk.

And what sort of ilk are we talking about? The ilk of the mighty mutant, as dreamt up by the wry and inventive Locke. “I want to make what I'd call good Friday night films,” he says, “films you'd see after a couple of beers or some bowling, but ones that aren't tacky.”

Locke had already created a buzz with his clever pop video about a paranoid, verbally adept singer (Jeffrey Lewis) riding the New York underground; and again with Eat In (1997), an evening's search for “girls and/or curry”. Now the buzz is a roar, thanks to Crust and its £3 million budget.

The anti-heroic star of Locke's highly professional film is a coral-pink, animatronic, 7ft-tall boxing shrimp. Kevin McNally (in a shiny silver shirt) teaches it to box professionally. This Babe-meets-Rocky shaggy shrimp story has already inspired the Japanese director Minoru Kawasaki to film stories such as Calamari Wrestler and Crab Goalkeeper.

But we don't have to go abroad for subterranean treats such as these. Besides Locke, Britain can boast Arthur Lager, with his three-minute Rape of the Arthuropods (1997), in which fearsome plastic crustaceans come to life and sexually assault naked Barbie dolls.

My introduction to the genre of slyly subversive SBTG (so bad they're good) movies came at the Edinburgh Festival a few years ago, when two young women named Tulip Junkie and Emma Millions treated us to a matinee of mini-monster films, including the Lager epic. Unfortunately, a contribution by the ladies themselves, called Honeymoon, showed a close-up of a penis for five seconds, and was therefore banned by the Provost of Edinburgh on religious grounds.

My brief encounter with these adventurous young ladies bore fruit in the shape of starring roles for them in a few contentious films of my own, including Lion's Mouth, a tragi-comedy about the notorious Rector of Stiffkey, who in the Thirties was defrocked for saving fallen women - mostly for himself.

Here are a few other titles of the bafflingly bizarre I can personally recommend:

The multitalented Jon Sorenson's sci-fi Alien Blood (1999) is about a woman and her daughter being chased across rural England by a band of white-masked assassins. They take refuge in a house full of fancy dress celebrants and the evening turns vampiric.

Or Steve Sullivan's comically robust A Heap of Trouble (2001), in which nine naked men march, singing, through suburbia, scaring women and children off the streets.

Frankenhooker (1990), directed by Frank Henenlotter, is your standard New Jersey love story. Boy meets girl. Girl gets sliced to ribbons by lawn mower. Boy patches girl back together with body parts from prostitutes. Girl goes on rampage in New York, leaving a trail of exploding prostitutes.

The content of Fred Olen Ray's Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1990) was self-explanatory, until the British censors removed “chainsaw” from the title.

Meanwhile, A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell (1991) reminds me of a scene from my own monsterpiece The Fall of the Louse of Usher (2002), in which there's an orgy between inflatable sex dolls and dinosaurs.

So much for special cases, but why should feature films that were not made expressly for the savage self-indulgent wit of it all escape the SBTG category? What about I Don't Want To Be Born (1975), featuring Joan Collins as a retired stripper who has a curse put on her by a dwarf for refusing to have sex with him. Nine months later she gives birth to a monstrous, flesh-ripping baby. A laugh a minute.

Or The Thing with Two Heads (1972), starring Ray Milland as a white racist who gets the head of a resentful African-American surgically grafted on to his shoulder.

And, just to confirm that such film treasures need not all be of the low-budget variety, I must mention Battlefield Earth (1997), a Scientology movie starring John Travolta as the leader of a race of greedy aliens who strip the world of its natural resources, using the broken remnants of humanity as slaves.

Too bad my own mutant story Bravetart - the tale of a sassy Scottish prostitute who fights a giant, cannibal haggis on the shores of Loch Ness - did not survive a recent fire at my home. But I've still got the camera.

So if scary monsters and sexy mayhem are your bag, go to www.comedybox.tv, where my old friend, the producer Emma Millions, opened the door for 25,000 viewers to enter the unmentionable world of the politically incorrect with my own five-minute moral monsterpiece, A Kitten for Hitler. Prepare to be shocked and outraged all over again!

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