>>1136
Yes, by expensive i meant they either blew all their allotted money in the cast due to most of them being ensemble works that "rented" the in-house theater residents for long periods of time rather than being a single one-time film job or went all-out with the sets which usually were WWII nazi soldier massacre porn that was/is still popular by some.
If my old notepad is not wrong i listed some recommendations and stuff i found to have high potential: 1980's Vruc Vetar, 1995's Slozna Braca, 1984's Sivi Dom, 1991's Zaboravljeni, 1990's Aleksa Santic, 1976's Vise Od Igre, 1995's Kraj Dinastije Obrenovic and 1972's Kamiondzije, there's also the old war stuff with 1974's Otpisani. I put 1970's Diplomci there too, it looks cheap as hell but i suppose i placed it there because the main cast are most of my preferred actors from the Belgrade circle. With these yugo series i think only the writing quality is of concern because i have yet to this day see a balkan production pre-breakup with bad or even average acting, they always nail a good balance between scenery-chewing and reflective stoicism along with some dark humor, it comes down to personal tastes regarding actors and their specific character polishing or sometimes the humor paint job a writer wants to do (juvenile and cringe comedy is usually a writer's fault rather than actor's delivery). The ones made in the war i don't know, yugos are not known for their set design but values seem to plummet hard around that time, fake mustaches (!) included.
It's worth nothing i haven't seen any of these because i have never found subtitles or download links for some, so after a while i stopped searching but nowadays there might be some advances.
The latin american thing is a personal experience as i saw some stuff late at night that i have never seen or read again and they were quite mind-bending for me back then, i recall an argentine series or mini-series in which the characters were in a house, and while going from room to room the whole set lifted and another came by instead of just walking or the camera cutting to another shot, it was bizarre but somehow it worked because the acting was as quirky due to the narrative being some sort of family drama about inane things, kinda like a sitcom acted in deadpan.
I also recall one, while not a fiction work, to be very interesting that i think was called Sicilia Desechable which was about the well-read host (a journalist surnamed Sicilia) talking how he will try to make the most interesting night show with varied content on a shoestring budget, i think he only had 20 bucks every episode, and just went onto trying to teach the audience something while also trying to get into free music shows/musicians playing on the street or anything he could think of to save money and about anything you could think of to entertain or fill minutes into the show. Most often he didn't even spend money so he saved it to other episodes, mind you this was in Venezuela just when the revolts and some small military skirmishes happened against parts of the population including the police thus criminals started to roam, around 2002-2004, so it came to a point he never went out of his house and just tried to explain/do stuff, like trying to imitate the tests of cleaning products from commercials or boil down Coca-Cola, until one day he just gave up and said that not even with money you could do things because shit was hitting the fan. He was criticized for trying to stir shit even when one of his rules was never meddle with politics but in the end he kinda was right, i saw the program years later of its original broadcast and it was always funny in a tragic way to see how the guy slowly realizes society was crumbling because everyone was paranoid and public trust was at some point non-existent; dude was quite revolutionary too, he was technically vlogging for a living in 2003 and did make a controversial joke about some trannies in a corner he filmed from far in a hotel room "you might laugh at those things now, but if we let our guards down they will rise to the top and crush us, society, in resentment". He was basically shitposting once a week on national (international) TV with no content limits.
1986's La Hora Marcada was also something interesting, a Twilight/Outer Limits latinamerican rip-off that was used as a medium to push or give experience to young directors and technicians, supposedly had some good episodes and i did see a couple but didn't find it to be that captivating although some people swear by it, for horror junkies it might be a goldmine. There might be more but you got me in a curve, actually never tried to list those so i guess i will from now on.