ABSTRACT
Director, writer, and producer Roger Corman has a fabled presence in the history of American cinema, directly responsible for beginning the careers of a number of notable American directors, including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, and Ron Howard. In addition to these, Corman produced a series of cheaply made genre fi lms throughout Latin America and Asia under his production company Concorde-New Horizons throughout the 1980s. These produced very lucrative results, mainly because of an effective direct-to-video exhibition strategy in the United States. These fi lms were made abroad primarily to capitalize on weak economies in countries which could nevertheless provide interesting natural settings. Given such low criteria, the rich location possibilities and the desperate fi nancial downturn of the national economy in the 1980s, Peru was a natural choice for Corman’s Concorde-New Horizons production company to exploit. In 1987, the fi rst Corman-produced fi lm was released: Hour of the Assassin starred former CHiPs heartthrob Erik Estrada as an assassin contracted by a corrupt government to assassinate the president-elect of the nonspecifi c Latin American country of ‘San Pedro.’ Continuing in 1989 with the futuristic, science fi ction-crime fi lm Crime Zone, Concorde-New Horizons would coproduce eleven fi lms in Peru over the next seven years.1
