The first movie of our Halloween Film Festival is Sleepy Hollow, directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci. I’ve always enjoyed Tim Burton’s movies. He has a real flair for the creepy and so ‘Sleepy Hollow’ was a good pick for kicking off this Halloween week film fest.
From the start you know this movie’s going to be cool, with a constant grey and foreboding atmosphere and some quick gruesome deaths. Really a great start. Unlike the clumsy schoolteacher from the Disney version of this tale, Johnny Depp’s Ichabod Crane is a New York City homicide detective who gets himself in trouble at work with his insistence that science can help solve crimes. He’s kind of a colonial-era forebearer to William Patterson’s character Gil Grissom on C.S.I.
So Icahabod the skeptical detective is sent to the boonies to investigate a spate of recent beheadings. Much darkness, blood and special effects laden mayhem ensues, and it is good. Two items muddy the story; Ichabod’s flashbacks that slowly reveal some black magic in his own past, and the way too complicated ‘it would have all worked if not for you meddling kids’ ending.
But there’s enough blood and gore to overcome these story faults. And in a role that didn’t require any time wasted on learning lines, Christopher Walken makes a very scary horseman.
On the Casey movie rating scale, I give it one thumb up. Not WAY up, just up.
further reading: Sleepy Hollow from Wikipedia