Roger Corman Presents is a series of films made for Showtime by film producer Roger Corman.[1]
Showtime approached Corman with the idea of doing a series of science fiction and horror feature films. They started filming in January 1995 and finished shooting 13 films in mid June with a budget of approximately $1.5 million each.[1]
Corman said, "I don't think a day went by that we weren't shooting. We were shooting on weekends, we were shooting at our studio here. We were shooting at local locations, and we shot one film in Moscow and one film in Manila. So we were all over the world with this thing."[2]
Corman ended up re-making two more films in the first season. According to Corman, "They were actually chosen by Showtime who did a lot of market research. I had said I didn't want to remake the Edgar Allan Poe pictures, because I didn't want to do those without Vincent, and also the period style of the pictures means that they're as new now as they were when they were made. Because the 19th century is the 19th century. Whereas the other pictures... being contemporary films could easily be remade, brought up to date, re-written for the '90s."[3]
The other nine were originals. Corman said, "One of them, we purchased a screenplay because we couldn't develop enough. We had three of the thirteen shot before this year, and I shot the other ten in five and a half months. We couldn't develop all the scripts so a picture called Terminal Virus was the script that we bought and it will be the last one to go on, and all the rest were scripts that we developed ourselves."[3]
Movies were still sporadically released under the Roger Corman Presents banner through 1999.
The 1997 film The Haunted Sea was originally intended as an episode of this anthology. However, it had a troubled production and was rejected by broadcaster Showtime, which determined that it did not meet its quality standards. It premiered on home video instead.[4]
