Movie of the day: The New Barbarians

Movie of today's Bad Movie Night was "The New Barbarians". It was really barbaric that movie... but at least it was one of the funniest so far. Unfortunately I haven't seen "For your Height" yet.

While watching the movie, I was trying to identify the reasons they failed in making a fairly decent movie. In the end, I had already given up: too many problems.

Let's start with the costume design: Jesus Christ, what was that??? I wonder who designed their clothes - they were absurdly awful and very, very cheesy. That made our audience vibrate.
The bad guys' outfit was white with exaggerated shoulder pads. When the camera moved closer to the costume, it was possible to see that the black stripes on their clothes were not more than black tape (yeah, black scotch tape!). Not to mention some characters' plastic clothes and the main female character's minimalist suit (lower part was an old style bikini and top was nothing but a cape).
The overall design was just of very bad taste. One can see that the production was on a budget and they used whatever cheap material they could get their hands on.

Production Design: as bad as Costume Design. Visible budget issues. They seemed not to care about realism at all. The cars used looked like golf carts; in some scenes where they perforated another car you could see it was only a metal sheet. You could even see foil paper in many of the sets (being used to MAKE the set). I understand that when in a budget you gotta use cheap materials, but why not to try to make them a little more realistic? This is also the director of photography's fault: he should've chosen a better angle to film it and make sure he wouldn't get a close up that would show what shouldn't be realized: that what was supposed to be hard metal was just foil paper.

Direction of Photography and Lighting: OMG! Seems like our cinematographer here didn't read even the first chapter of "Painting with Light", because if he did, he would know that his type of lighting was very wrong and made no sense. No beauty, no definition of time (you can't situate well what time of the day it was) and no sense of use of the lighting equipment (lights in the background were too strong for the scene - objects, props and people were not being well lit either and the high illumination in the back sometimes would even bother the eyes). I admit I know nothing about it, but I believe that he probably used a "Brute" all the time (well, I don't know if that would be current name for this type of light or if they are still being used) in the background light. There is one scene I can mention now: there is this small hill and a bush on top of it. It is daylight, but the light is so bright in the background it seems like you're looking straight into a strong lamp, a doctor's lamp or something alike.
Some of the shots were very bad in terms of angles, too. Can't remember a specific example right now.

Screenplay: this might be the worst of all. Or maybe the second worst, being the direction the worst of all.
The dialogues were weak; the story didn't make much sense. There are no explanations of what happened, where they are, who are those people, anything. The plot is very confusing.

Special Effects: what were those guns???? Lasers? What about the explosions????? What the f... was that????

Sound: saying that the sound of the movie was bad because the movie is old is not fair to the good old movies. The sound in this movie is bad because it was bad done. This is purely a bad, bad job. Microfone? I don't know. I don't understand about sound yet, but it clearly was a problem in the direction of sound. Voices were too low, it was difficult to know what they were talking about, kind of "clouded", if it's possible to know what I mean.

But, in the end, we all had a good time and a lot of fun laughing at this unfortunate production!