Monterra Entertainment

Monterra Entertainment, LLC is an American home entertainment and production company. The company was founded in 1981 by Ken Martinez, and is famous for it's distribution of theatrical, independent, television and home video motion pictures; spin-off company Town Square Pictures started out as a unit of the company. The company's name is a hybrid of the Spanish word for "mountain" ("Montaña") and the Latin word for "Earth" ("terra").

History
Monterra Entertainment was formed in 1981 and began operating as a domestic home video distributor in early 1982. The company was founded by film buff and aspiring filmmaker Ken Martinez after he won $10,000 off a ticket, with additional money being sourced from a  grant. The company initially distributed budget-priced public domain releases and low-quality VHS releases of monster movies and B-movies. However, after a deal made with filmmaker David J. Feigenbaum, it began expanding into other fields, such as VHS releases of independent movies and TV show compilations.

In 1988, Monterra entered the video games industry as Monterra Games. Monterra Games' most notable product was the MagicDeck, a peripheral cartridge for the (NES) that expanded the console's capabilities by adding more RAM, allowing for higher resolution graphics and larger games, and by providing a connector to which a regular cassette player can be connected, thus permitting larger games, stored on tape, to be loaded.

Monterra entered motion picture production with the opening of its Monterra Pictures subsidiary. Its first release was the 1988 film Werewolves, which led to a successful franchise. In 1992, the Monterra Pictures unit was spun-off as Town Square Pictures.

During the 1990s, Monterra Entertainment was famous for it's home video releases of concert videos by major artists.

In August 1996, Rescue 911, one of Monterra Entertainment's biggest home video sellers, was cancelled after seven seasons. This left Monterra scrambling to find a new television property to help lead its video sales. Monterra chose to partner with Latikuu Holdings USA to supply the home video unit with TV shows based off Latikuu's concepts as well as films from Latikuu's Caldatite film production unit. The partnership between Monterra and Latikuu Edacra has been long-standing, with Monterra handling the U.S./Canada home video releases for several of Latikuu Edacra's TV shows and several events of Latikuu Edacra's World Martial Arts Championship MMA promotion.

In 2003, Martinez sold Monterra Entertainment and a majority stake in Town Square Pictures to, who placed them under the control of their Applause unit.

In 2013, Applause Networks purchased Belo Corporation's entertainment assets, including Monterra and Town Square Pictures. Applause Media was formed as a holding company for Applause Networks.

Horror
For many years, Monterra Entertainment has been known for its releases of horror and cult films, particularly those of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

Special interest
In addition to feature films, Monterra has distributed special interest titles, including children's series, such as Mole Miner and Peek-a-Boo!.

Monterra was the home video distributor for Rescue 911.