Word: hollowed
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...Those who want to revive their childhood reactions to this spooky but charming ghost story should rerent the Disney cartoon. Sleepy Hollow in Burton's hands is a darker, stranger, cheaper shade of horror. It's less clippety-cloppety, more blood-spattery. Irving's simple three-main-character plot gives way to a convoluted collection of Van Tassles and other conniving townspeople who sustain an even more convoluted chain of mysterious events for the investigative Ichabod to logically piece together. More of a saga and certainly scarier and gorier than the original tale, the film version maintains an oddly light...
...fact, all of the women of Sleepy Hollow are outfitted in bosom-popping dresses--perhaps a nod to Irving's description of Katrina as "buxom." Ichabod's mother, played by Lisa Marie (Tim Burton's wife), breastily swirls in flowery dream sequences that contrast with the bleak scenes of reality. And then of course we have Christina Ricci as Katrina, short, blond and busty...
...Alternatively, all of the men of Sleepy Hollow are linked by a different characteristic. Dressed in black, they all get horrendously bloody, either spattered by the blood of others, or bathed in their...
...movies greatest strength is its cinematography. With pale men squeezed into 18th century black suits and a perpetual mist clouding the nights sky, this film is shot in color; it just feels black and white. Filmed at an artificial set in a small town in England, Sleepy Hollow is overwhelmingly gray. It takes some getting used to, as all of Burtons fantasies do, but after about ten minutes of acclimation, the setting takes shape, and you come to appreciate the brilliant construction of the town and the landscape. Corn fields shrink in the shadow of freaky-looking scarecrows...
...universe, where supernatural evil is prompted by human vice, and the consequences are so relentlessly gory that even the trees bleed. If only to let the blood flow longer and more freely (even in one gratuitous scene, from the implied decapitation of a little boy), this version of Sleepy Hollow expands significantly and more disturbingly on the original. Irving's tale becomes entwined in a complicated plot of greed and corruption, a horrifying subplot explaining the psychological warping of Ichabod, and several impressive fight scenes in which the decapitations have an especially martial flare. (Star Wars fans may notice similarities...