And Laurie Strode onto set

From CHUD, "Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake may be one of the most internet-scrutinized movies of all time, and that’s saying something, considering that we live in a time after all three Star Wars prequels and the Lord of the Rings movies. But there’s been a perfect storm of interest here: the fans have just about had enough of the remake craze, the original Halloween is seen as sacred text, Rob Zombie is a controversial figure with a very strong personal vision, and maybe most importantly, he’s kept the fans consistently in the loop via MySpace. We’ve been privy to decision after decision and cast hire after hire not through the usual filter of the trades, but directly from Rob at the Halloween movie’s MySpace blog. And that’s where his latest announcement came from: he’s finally cast his Laurie Strode, the Survivor Girl played by Jamie Lee Curtis in the original, and she’s Scout Taylor-Compton.

What’s interesting is that while Taylor-Compton has had a number of film roles in her short career (including An American Crime, a movie I was very interested in that got savaged at Sundance this year), she may be best known to America because she ran away from home two years ago and was missing for two weeks. She, being a pretty young white girl, got tons of media coverage in those two weeks.

Taylor-Compton (it sounds like she’s the product of a union between a singer/songwriter and a gangsta rapper) will be joining a cast that can best be described as mammoth, including Malcolm McDowell, Daeg Faerch, Tyler Mane, Sheri Moon Zombie, Pat Skipper, Dee Wallace Stone, William Forsythe, Ken Foree, Lew Temple, Danny Trejo, Hanna Hall, Danielle Harris, Adrienne Barbeau, Clint Howard, Courtney Gains, Daryl Sabara, Heather Bowen, Brad Dourif, Udo Kier and Kristina Klebe.

And now the next phase in scrutiny can begin: the movie starts shooting this Monday, and you can bet that tons of people will be trying to get on to and take pictures of the set, and what’s going on there. It should be an interesting couple of months, and I wonder if the movie will ever be able to recover from the negative buzz and just get judged as its own work."