There’s a part in “The Troubadors” (2007, unrated) where a character who makes a living mechanically inseminating pigs explains what keeps him in business.

“Keeping America in bacon isn’t pretty. Someone’s got to keep feeding your faces, though.”

That about sums up someone’s hunger (and someone who gives out awards, amazingly) for bad, cheap, artsy movies like it and “Went to Coney Island On a Mission From God, Be Back By 5” (1998).

The two old pals in “Went to Coney Island On a Mission From God, Be Back By 5” go to Coney Island to find a boy they grew up with, who they’ve heard has become a trash-picking mental case. The audience learn that his insanity was prompted because he was homosexual, and while he was trying to pick up the counter boy at the local salsa record shop, he left his little sister to run in the street, where she was mowed down by a taxi. The other two characters drop the ball finding him because they are too easily distracted by community theater “characters:” The Skee-Ball operator with passionate economic theories about ticket transactions. The homeless lady picking through restaurant food who thinks “meat is murder.” The freak show’s bearded lady, who has had electrolysis. The wise grandson of the bumper car operator. The twinkling eyed boardwalk photo-taker (Dominic Chianese) and the dockworker who had his heart broken by his transvestite lover Julie (Peter Gerety), who both thankfully had their talent vindicated in “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” years later.

“The Troubadors” follows a stultified Chicago chainsmoker who slumps home, to southern Illinois (Kentucky, for all intents and purposes) to be revived by some time with his friends. They’re that group of 30-ish losers you see slamming Jagermeister at the local dive bar. One of them always convince everyone it’s a great idea if they go out to the middle of the woods at closing time and drink jimson weed tea/drop acid and stay up all night blasting “Heartbeats” on repeat from someone’s open hatchback and drinking Dickel. And someone pulls out the cell phone camera and takes a video of themselves, making ironic eyes at each other and mumbling deep, philosophical questions like,

“What’s your story? Are you here for a couple cheap thrills, then back to the big city? Or are you just another casualty of the boulevard of broken dreams?”

“Coney Island” is especially jarring because the half of it shot as yellow-lit flashback might as well be another movie, “childhood was good back when we lifted candy bars and comics from the corner store” outtakes from “The Sandlot.” The other half is spent tagging along as Jon Cryer (Duckie from in “Pretty and Pink”) and his friend Stan (a charming gentleman who tries to pay his video poker debts by pawning his fiancee’s heirloom locket, then gets violent with her when he finds out it’s only worth $90) wonder half-heartedly about the transient fate of their friend Richie.

In “The Troubadors,” days are spent throwing rocks into the river. Nights are spent drinking and whooping by the grain elevator and exchanging lines like “Everyone’s acting like history’s already done!” and “We’re technically fulfilled but morally bankrupt” And whenever anything gets slow or confusing, there’s a tilt-a-whirl flashback of a taxidermied deer head (scary!), the main character trying to pull his hand out of the mud (creepy!) and someone in a gas mask thrashing in a river (oooo!). It’s like Leigh Bowery’s “walking art form” act, if it was thought up by the breed of young drunks who think it’s the epitome of social commentary to pee on a “These Colors Don’t Run” sign — handmade, so that the colors actually do run! The worst thing about it is that it seeks to be in the spirit of Bill Hicks, naming one character Will and another Hicks and opening with part of his “The world is like a ride at an amusement park,” speech — which they goof with a typo.

And as far as buddy movies go, I just watched a seven-minute video about a group of friends, one of whom is challenged to eat six of the hottest grade of hot wings at a New Jersey “Cluck U Chicken” chain, and it was better than “The Troubadors” and “Coney Island” combined.

The guys who made “The Troubadors” wrote on their Web page that the spirit of their production company “is held in the soda machine scene from Troubadours. Let’s take this old rusty machine, unplug it from this useless outlet, and drop it off out in the middle of nowhere. See what happens.”

I don’t know what they think happens when you drop a Dr. Pepper machine in the middle of a back road. Maybe they should sit there and watch it. Given a choice of that, or watching “The Troubadors” and “Coney Island” again, I’d take the sody water.