Sleepy Hollow
Director: Tim Burton
101 minutes (15) 2000
widescreen 1.85:1
Pathé DVD retail
review by Tony Lee
At last, director Tim Burton and star Johnny Depp have excelled themselves with a film worthy
of their peculiar talents. Sleepy Hollow is a wonderful gothic romance that scores
highly as rural murder mystery with character-based humour, and special effects horror thriller
with a traditional witch-crafty plot. Based on the folk tale by Washington Irving, Andrew Kevin
Walker's screenplay features homage to old Dracula, Frankenstein and Hammer
horror movies, yet Sleepy Hollow arrives as full-scale genre classic.
From the first electrifying scene, we are transported to a truly supernatural
realm where the headless horseman decapitates locals with devilish skill and a relentless
determination. Although the moody opening hints of a science versus superstition element, this
is brushed aside before too long and Depp's young city detective readily becomes courageous
ghost-buster, when his own repressed memories of a thoroughly ghastly childhood trauma surface
to affect his responses to inexplicable, shocking, gruesome, and hysterical events.
The sustained quality of production design, atmospheric set lighting,
strikingly well created images, and evocative yet unobtrusive music (score is by Burton's
regular collaborator, Danny Elfman), combine perfectly in this film's stylish, magically unreal
landscape, as magnificently visualised in every respect as anything we have seen since Ridley
Scott's painterly forest fantasy, Legend (1985). The casting is thoughtful (Michael
Gambon, Jeffrey Jones, Richard Griffith and one or two surprising cameos), and rarely less than
endearing - though Miranda Richardson is somewhat guilty of chewing up the scenery in her
expositional speeches. The tree of the dead is a nightmarish home to fearsome horrors and
there's an exhilarating stagecoach chase to rival the breathtaking stunts of 'Indiana Jones',
but my favourite bit of all is - well, it's about 100 minutes long really. Wake up, sleepy
heads! This is bewitching time.
DVD extras: fabulous animated menus, scene selection in 18 chapters with clip
inserts, two cinema trailers, photo gallery, cast biographies, two 'making-of' shorts: Behind
The Legend, Reflections On Sleepy Hollow, plus English subtitles.
Tony Lee
originally published in VideoVista #18 (September 2000)
DOWSE
Guide to the Movies
is
compiled by Tony
Lee editor of Pigasus Press
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