Roger Corman says he doesn’t believe his old friend David Carradine intended to commit suicide when he was found hanging in his Bangkok hotel room in June 2009.
But Corman, the legendary B-movie producer and director who produced Carradine’s final movie, Syfy’s “Dinocroc vs. Supergator,” does acknowledge that Carradine, 72 when he died, led a wild life.
“He was a highly intelligent and dedicated actor who had a tumultuous personal life and had been married a number of times,” Corman says.
For the record, Carradine was married six times to five different women.
“He lived a fairly wild personal life as evidenced by what happened in Bangkok,” Corman said. “But when he worked he was totally focused.
“He was one of those people whose wildness in his personal life never interfered with his work.”
The actual cause of Carradine’s death has never been fully determined, though two autopsies concluded he died from “accidental asphyxiation” — leading some to believe he was killed by an episode of autoerotic asphyxiation gone awry.
“That would seem possible to me,” Corman says. “I don’t think David was the type of person who would commit suicide.
“But on the other hand, you don’t know what’s in the deep recesses of someone else’s mind.”
In “Dinocroc vs. Supergator,” which airs a week from Saturday, Carradine plays Jason Drake, the oily head of a conglomerate conducting DNA research in Hawaii — research which unleashes terror on the island.
It is one of a series of campy, horror-and-suspense movies patterned after the low-budget, drive-in pictures of the 1950s that was commissioned as a made-for TV movie by the fantasy cable channel.
The movies, airing on Saturday nights, have become a cult hit for SyFy.
It’s one of several Corman-Carradine collaborations that stretch back more than 20 years — including the movies “Boxcar Bertha,” “Death Race 2000” and “Death Sports.”
Corman says the only reason “Dinocroc vs. Supergator” has taken so long to air since Carradine’s death is a purely technical one. The actor’s death did not delay the movie, he said.
“It’s just a matter of timing,” he says. “There’s an inordinate amount of special computer graphics [in the movie] that just takes forever.”
The movie that Carradine was filming at the time of his death, “Stretch,” was never completed.
Earlier this month the actor’s widow filed a wrongful death suit against the movie’s French producers, claiming they should never have left him alone in a hotel room.