Hallmark Releasing was a Boston-based American film distribution company. With a pointedly provocative approach, Hallmark’s first major success was with German import Mark of the Devil (1970) which was picked up for US showing with an April 1972 promo that included come-ons such as “Positively the most horrifying film ever made” and “Rated V for Violence”, while vomit bags were given free to the audience upon admission. They subsequently came up with the oft-repeated phrase: “It’s only a movie!”
Hallmark developed from the rapidly-growing Esquire Theaters (“a chain of about a hundred screens” according to David Konow in Reel Terror: The Scary, Bloody, Gory, Hundred-Year History of Classic Horror Films). Hallmark was owned by three partners: Steve Minasian, Phil Scuderi and Robert Barsamain.
Vomit bags were back for Amando de Ossorio directed Spanish import Tombs of the Blind Dead and although this was also “most horrifying film ever made”, it was not “positively” this time.
In August 1972, Hallmark distributed The Last House on the Left, Wes Craven’s breakthrough ultra-shocking sex ‘n’ violence combo that showcased power tool carnage before it became world famous via a certain Texas Chain Saw Massacre a couple of years later.
Clearly on a roll of ballyhoo and bloodshed, the company then promoted Mario Bava’s land grab proto-slasher A Bay of Blood in May 1972 with the rather more outré title Twitch of the Death Nerve. Punters were advised that they must receive a warning “face-to-face!”
In January 1973 the hucksters released Italian import Slaughter Hotel (1971) with the crude sensationalist tag line “See the slashing massacre of 8 innocent nurses!’ Subtlety was not a Hallmark trademark. Not to be out done, American International Pictures (AIP) handled the wider release of both this – retitled Asylum Erotica – and the aforementioned Last House on the Left, plus a number of other Hallmark pick-ups.
Originally entitled The Forgotten, S.F Brownrigg’s previously overlooked 1973 offering became Don’t Look in the Basement and The Snake Pit. But by any title “it’s only a movie”…
At some point in the later 1970s Hallmark seems to have either become known as Newport or at least partnered with a distribution company of this name. If we find out more we will update this entry. In the meantime, Hallmark/Newport re-released Massimo Dallamano’s 1971 What Have You Done to Solange? as The School That Couldn’t Scream.
A 1977/78 release House by the Hill seems to be a retitling of Charles Manson cash-in The Cult (1971) but as Temple of Schlock states this is not clear, as yet.
Hallmark later financed Friday the 13th (1980) which was subsequently distributed by Hollywood studio Paramount in a ground-breaking move that showed easy $$$’s were more important to the majors since Jaws had shown that exploitation and horror were such big business. According to David Konow’s aforementioned book: “Betsy Palmer remembered two of the Hallmark partners who “were like the men in black… these strange men lurking around the set… all they told us was that these were the moneymen from Boston.”
The men in black… who knew it’s “only a movie!”
Adrian J Smith, Horrorpedia
