I posted what is possible with basically the worst figures available in your local discount shop a while ago:
https://deathzap.co.uk/2021/08/15/polishing-a-turd/
And recently I had a strange hankering to paint some truly terrible figures. I think the worst a available (although if you’re aware of worse please let me know) are these guys:
I’ve had some before although from a local shop, and instead of trying to create something realistic, I went down the old school toy soldier route:
They are rather deformed, almost flats, and some previously seen poses oddly stretched?
Excitedly I picked out some from the pack and started working.
Each figure had a bath in my ultrasonic cleaner, in methylated spirits which was to remove any mould release.
Citadel 32mm bases seemed appropriate, and comedically expensive compared to the figures.
I decided to go with slapchop to begin with and then to follow that up with usual highlighting. I also experimented as you can see above with a flesh tone rather than white drybrush to see if that helped with the saturation of the colours going over the top.
With a little metallic drybrush over the weapons they were mostly done.
I think there’s gold in them there hills if you’re willing to polish a few turds.
They look pretty good if you stick to certain angles.
Deathzap 
Nice color schemes. But yes, they are really distorted figures! They look like some sort of warp weapon was used on them – to warp them.
Look rather in keeping with 2.5D printed terrain!
Temporal soldiers I think. Stretched and deformed by the weird energies emitted and absorbed by their teleportation devices.
There’s some terrifying body horror right there.
Shudder!!! 😀
Regards, Chris.