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  DOWSE movie guide review of Sleepy Hollow

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
You can order videos and DVD releases reviewed on these pages at Blackstar

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