B-movie legend in the news!

[Vermin Boy]

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/07/14/tarzans_tiger_shot_to_death_after_florida_escape/

Why is this relevant, you ask? Simple. While the article mentions that Steve Hawkes was in a couple Tarzan movies, they neglect to mention his shining moment: the hippie-eating, drug-addicted were-turkey in Blood Freak!

[Yaddo42]

I saw this mentioned in several news crawls and figured they probably meant Ron Ely or Mike Henry, since they said "Tarzan" from the late 60s, until I looked closer. I didn't recognize the name Steve Hawkes, checked with IMDB, neither of his Tarzan films had permission to use the name from the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate, and apparently the name was altered when the films were released in English language territories, trying to avoid the obvious lawsuits. I didn't even know there were other unauthorized Tarzan films from that time besides the animated French one. I sure didn't know about Hawkes' being the main force behind "Blood Freak" ( a flick on my wish list of truly bad cinema to see some day), since I mostly know of the film from reading and reputation only. I wonder if Keith Olbermann featured this in the "Oddball" segment of his news show, he loves stuff like this.

Speaking of former Tarzan actors, has anyone else seen the Gorton's fish ads featuring "one film only Tarzan" Denny Miller as the fishing boat captain?

[Yaddo42]

Olbermann actually interviewed him Wednesday night, he seemed pretty torn up ( and maybe a little drunk, my WAG) about the tiger's death convinced the cops overreacted by not trying to use tranquilizers first. He also still has traces of his European accent. His name was given as Steve Sipek (his birth name apparently), and I looked for evidence of the burns he received on a film set years ago, but didn't see anything from the brief shots of his body or fooatge of him feeding another tiger. They made one mention of him playing Tarzan in a pretaped newspiece (and had a shot of a poster with a picture of him at the time) but no mention of his film career was made during the interview itself. And I guess "Blood Freak" would be hard to explain to regular folks in such a brief space of time without seeming to take a cheap shot at Hawkes/Sipek.