It probably wasn't top of Hitler's "to do" list but one of the Third Reich's wackier legacies has been a deluge of bonkers 21st century B-movies. We've had the camp space Nazis of Iron Sky. An undead Wehrmacht serial killer in Nazi Dawn. The vengeful, subterranean Nazis at the Centre of the Earth. And now, courtesy of the forthcoming Sky Sharks, zombie Nazis whooshing about on jet-powered marine predators.  These movies sound slightly too ridiculous to exist. A generation previously they would probably never have advanced further than a stoned conversational at a horror convention. But the plummeting costs of digital effects have put state-of-the-art film-making tools at the disposal of aspiring pulp auteurs.  Thus has been unleashed what might be plausibly called the "Sharkpocalypse" – a downpour of cinema profound in its awfulness, typically featuring a fruity combination of Sharks/Nazis/ half-forgotten Eighties celebrities.  You will already be familiar with Sharknado, the Tara Reid-starring franchise returning this week with the genuinely much-anticipated Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! But fish-based weather systems are merely the beginning of the silliness.  Sky Sharks, trumpeted by German director Marc Fehse as "the ultimate cult movie", has raised in excess of £70,000 on crowd-funding website Kickstarter and is schedule for release in 2016. An Iron Sky sequel, with added dinosaurs, is in post-production. We are living through a golden age of eye-rollingly fruity novelty flicks.  Like a grotesque parody of the Dogme 95 movement or French New Wave, a unifying sensibility ties together many of these movies. There's the aforementioned Shark/Nazis obsession and a fascination with clever-preposterous titles of which Morrissey would be proud. They often star popular culture has-beens almost but not quite returned to obscurity (Sharknado 2 briefly paired Reid with Billy Ray Cyrus, while David Hasselhoff and Malcolm in the Middle's Frankie Muniz are to appear in the third installment, alongside a Jedward cameo).  What truly ties these films together, though, is that they are the children of the post-DVD era. A decade ago, video chains were gate-keepers of the B-pic industry. If Blockbuster didn't order 30,000 copies of your odyssey about Panzer-driving vampires, it might as well not exist.  With the internet supplanting physical media as primary means of distribution, however, the new generation of schlock merchants can reach a potentially vast audience.  This is how Iron Sky came to be. It started as a joke between friends in a Finnish sauna. What if the Nazis didn't lose the Second World War but retreated to the far side of the Moon and spent the intervening 50 years constructing a vast space navy? So far, so throwaway. Then the makers turned to the web in search of funding for their $7.5 million feature – and were duly showered in hot fanboy cash.  Side-by-side with the rise of enthusiastic first timers such as the team behind Iron Sky, the aesthetic of the modern B-movie has been moulded by a more established proponent of pulp: Hollywood's the Asylum. The Burbank-based operation operates self- consciously in the tradition of earlier trash cheerleaders such as Troma Film and was initially synonymous with the "mockbuster" genre as typified by Transmorphers, The Da Vinci Treasure and Snakes on a Train (a B-flick pastiching a B-flick).  With 2009's Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus, the Asylum stumbled upon a whole new raison d'être. Starring Eighties pop shrieker Debbie Gibson, Mega Shark was a surprise cult phenomenon – much of its prominence owed to buzz generated on an emerging social network platform called Twitter.  The success of the film, and the ensuing media clamour, constituted a newsflash for the Asylum and SyFy, the cable network that distributes many of the studio's features. There was a market for winkingly ludicrous romps, independent of whatever happened to be popular in the cinema at any moment.  The flood-gates of schlock had been blasted open, and the Asylum would contribute further with the Sharknado series, in addition to Mega Shark Versus Mecha Shark, the Godfather II of giant shark pictures. "There has been a surge in shark movies – the concepts are getting more outrageous, and Sharknado is the pinnacle," the Asylum's Paul Bales told the Hollywood Reporter in 2013. "I don't know if Steven Spielberg would agree, but we started the shark movie trend with…Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, which gave Syfy courage to up the ante on sharks."  The majority of these productions are, it goes without saying, entirely unwatchable. Still, a few are enjoyable and one or two contain glimmers of actual artistic merit. Iron Sky, for instance, boasts gleaming production values and can be read as a surprisingly effective satire of consumerism and humanity's readiness to forget the misdeeds of the past.  Nevertheless, it's hard not to conclude something is being lost as the B-picture throws itself into the embrace of knowing awfulness. None of the films listed here take themselves even vaguely seriously. Tongues are lodged in cheek, stilted lines delivered with a wink and a leer. That the monsters look fake is entirely the point.  This is in contrast to the pulp diversions of earlier decades. Night of the Living Dead, George A Romero's 1968 ground zero zombie parable, was assembled on a shoe-string. However, it was chillingly strait-laced and, notwithstanding the occasional amateur fumble, achieved a haunting grandeur.  Nor was James Cameron clowning around when he shot a high-jinks sci-fi flick about a robot with an Austrian accent running amok in Los Angeles in pursuit of the mother of his future nemesis. Were it made today The Terminator would probably be called Killer Robot Versus Flying Piranha Man and feature a laser-toting SS division (Dolph Lundgren could play Flying Piranha Man). It would be rubbish, air five times nightly on SyFy and be forgotten within a month.  There's a sobering moral here. The B-movie has been having a conspicuously bawdy time lately. And yet, in embracing ridiculousness for its own sake, it has surrendered the power to shock and move us or to change the discourse of mainstream cinema (as Romero and Cameron did). Flying Nazis are good for a chuckle – but the ultimate joke may be on the audience.
Flying sharks; space Nazis; zombie Nazis riding flying sharks (or dinosaurs). Where will the B-movie arms race end? asks Ed Power