Happy Birthday Rory Calhoun!

The handsome actor Rory Calhoun's birthday is August 8. He was a solid, butch, good-looking, leading man who had a slightly criminal past, which only made me like him more. He also starred in a few of my favorite cult films like Motel Hell (1980), in which he played the homicidal Farmer Vincent who ran a motel and used his clientele to make sausages. There's also The Night of the Lepus (1972), where he and Janet Leigh battled giant rabbits, Angel (1984), about a high school girl who turned tricks on Hollywood Boulevard at night and Colossus of Rhodes (1960), a great sword and sandals epic in which he played "Dario the Daring" and was directed by the late great Sergio Leone (Once Upon a Time in the West)! You can now get Colossus on www.warnervideo.com as part of their Camp Cult Classics, and it's a lot of fun. Calhoun died Aug. 28, 1988 but even Mr. Burns on The Simpsons memorialized him in the take-off episode on 101 Dalmatians...