A few weeks too late for Halloween, Tim Burton delivers a good old fashioned home-spun horror story based upon Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Johnny Depp plays the feeble, yet determined, Ichabob Crane who comes to a small New York town to investigate a series of murders supposedly committed by a "headless horseman." This one kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time. Depp was very good and there was plenty of good action, but what I enjoyed most was the stunningly beautiful look of the entire film. No small detail was overlooked. Witches, ghosts and lots of blood may at times make this one seem far-fetched, but you have to remember one thing: it's really only a modified campfire story.

Where Washington Irving was a writer of style and wit, Tim Burton is a director who paints imaginative visual images. The marriage of the two in this case, doesn't work. In print, the story reads like a fable with undertones of horror. On screen, it's just overblown to the point of being ridiculous. This Sleepy Hollow is a dark, gruesome, somber village, more suited to Frankenstein or Dracula, than to a hamlet in upstate New York, even IF that hamlet does have its' own monster...a headless horseman. It's a great movie set, waiting for a story to be told in it, but this story is stupid, where it should be smart, and boring when it attempts to be tongue-in-cheek.Only Johnny Depp, as a very prissy, wimpy Ichabod Crane(exactly what he should be!), comes close to pulling it off. A trio of great British stage actors(Michael Gough, Michael Gambon, and Miranda Richardson)can't do anything to breath life into this headless body.