You may find yourself laughing so hard that it will be hard to keep your head attached...

Rating: 8/10 (27 March 2014)

O.K., any film director who can make you laugh at the sight of heads being chopped off (not to mention throats slit) is my kind of director. Tim Burton has been keeping me laughing ever since he had Pee Wee Herman ask where the basement in the Alamo was. Then, he had me sobbing (along with the Danny Elfman music) to Johnny Depp making ice sculptures in "Edward Scissorhands", martians chatting unstop in "Mars Attacks!" while dissolving people, and of course, the newly dead learning how to scare the living in "Beetlejuice". All of these films are now modern classics, and "Sleepy Hollow" is up there because of the artistic way it has modernized Washington Irving's classic and the themes of vengeance and terror it combined to make a riveting view of hell on earth.
From the moment you see Johnny Depp here, you are back in his Chaplin- esque world of screen acting, a true artist at work, and the Lon Chaney of our modern film world. He is an eccentric who has no idea he's eccentric, and when you see him suddenly being squirted by the blood of the dead as he operates on them, you instantly are given a priceless reaction that isn't "eew", but "I knew that was going to happen." Depp's Ichabod Crane isn't the tall, skinny scaredy cat of the classic animated film, but a sexy crime fighter whose mind has been warped by the lessons learned in childhood. "Villainy wears many masks. None so dangerous as the face of virtue", he says, and that is evidenced here, first by the religiously intolerant father who murdered his mother for apparent devil worship, and then by the seemingly noble perpetrator of all the evil that the headless horseman (Christopher Walken in flashbacks) must commit in order to be reunited with his missing face.
There's an art to making decapitations funny, and Tim Burton works overtime to make each one of them memorable. Just as he did with "Sweeney Todd", Burton prevents making them gory by making them hysterically funny. Yes, there is plenty of blood and carnage, and two deaths are extremely gruesome. But when heads roll, they sometimes spin first, unable to ask questions later, and in one case, Depp finds one of the heads rolling towards him in a particularly vulnerable area. Then, there is the "tree of the dead", a visual so evil looking, that it can only be described as the entrance to another world best not visited. The next time you walk through a park or through wooded areas, you will notice trees of many different shapes and may even spot one that at night will appear much spookier than it is during the day.
The cast is uniformly excellent, with Christina Ricci an appropriately vulnerable heroine (whose motives are always in question), Miranda Richardson as unforgettable as always (here, resembling Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction"), and a supporting cast of male stage and screen vets who each contribute in one way or another. Richard Griffiths is particularly fine as the local magistrate, and of course, Walken (doing nothing but a Frankenstein grunt) makes his evil character totally menacing.
This is one of those films that you might find yourself watching over and over again (like most Tim Burton films) and sharing with those who haven't seen it. In spite of the gory nature of the story, the laughs come frequent, are never juvenile or gratuitous, and add to the fun and fast-moving nature of the Gothic tale being unfolded.