David Carradine, RIP

It's an ill wind, as they say, and some sad news has been sending a fair amount of visitors my way. Like all lovers of bizarre low budget exploitation movies, I was shocked and saddened to hear of the death of David Carradine last week. It is the continued confusion surrounding the nature of his demise which has been fuelling traffic to The Sleaze. Now, I must admit that I was somewhat surprised when it was originally reported that he had committed suicide, especially when the first radio report I heard claimed that a maid had found him hanging naked in the closet of his Bangkok hotel room. Whilst I freely admit that I'm no expert on suicide, hanging yourself in a closet, when there must be many easier ways to hang yourself in a hotel room, does seem a strange thing to do, even if you are feeling suicidal. When later reports claimed that he had a rope around his neck and 'other parts of his body', it seemed that he might actually have met his end in an act of auto-asphyxiation gone wrong. If so, it just makes his death even sadder. Even sadder than that, lots of sick bastards started searching the web for anything to do with death by auto-asphyxiation. Which led to a sudden surge in popularity for an old story of mine - Cruel and Unusual - which has nothing to do with David Carradine, but does feature auto-asphyxiation as a means of execution. To make things worse, by Sunday they were visiting in their droves in search of 'celebrity autopsy pictures', presumably as a result of the release of post-mortem pictures of David Carradine. All they found was Celebrity Autopsy, which again doesn't feature David Carradine, but does satirise the morbid obsession in some quarters with such things.

However, I'm not here to bury David Carradine, but to praise him. A childhood icon for me as a result of his appearances in the Kung Fu TV series, I subsequently found, to my delight, that Carradine had appeared in some truly great, off-beat, low-budget movies. Granted, many were crap and unworthy of his talents (but they doubtless paid the bills for him and his family), but others were real classics. Everybody, of course, remembers his turn as 'Frankenstein' in the wonderful Death Race 2000, a typical Roger Corman production that happily mixes exploitation thrills with satire and social comment, but equally good was his appearance as the cop hero of Larry Cohen's surreal Q- The Winged Serpent, in which the titular Aztec god turns up in1970s New York and nests in the upper reaches of the Chrysler Building. Thanks to an interest in classic horror movies, I also discovered John Carradine, and wasn't surprised when I learned that he was David's father. Another magnificent performer in B-movies, who was prepared to appear in any crap in order to finance his various Shakespearean stage productions, John Carradine was another actor far better than most of his material. Although a ripe old in ham in lots of those old Monogram and Universal pictures of the 1940s (and even more poverty-stricken Z-grade flicks well into the 1970s), John Carradine was also an adept and memorable character actor in many bigger-budget productions. Whilst John Carradine succumbed to a heart attack many years ago, ensuring he is remembered for his films, the nature of David Carradine's death means that, sadly, he'll inevitably be remembered as 'that guy who strangled himself in a closet during a bizarre sex act'. Frankly, he deserves far better than that.