1999 is widely considered one of the best years for film in the medium’s history.

The Mummy, The Matrix, Fight Club, The Sixth Sense, Toy Story 2, Office Space, and several other notable offerings have a lot of folks absolutely in love with the last year of the 1990’s from a cinematic perspective. This is all to say that when you ask folks to name their favorite years of movies, 1999 ends up coming up a lot.

So we’re going to get into a quick talking point before we even hit the discussion on Sleepy Hollow: What is your favorite year at the movies? Is it 1999? Maybe 1994, with The Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, and Forrest Gump? Perhaps something more surprising (some other answers that sprang up when I postulated this to my Facebook community included 2006, 1987, and 1973).

As I scrolled through Letterboxd trying to determine my favorite year, I was unsurprised to see 2019 pop up as an immediate possibility–I have four 5 star movies that year (Parasite, Avengers: Endgame, Jojo Rabbit, and Weathering With You) to go with an additional two 4.5 star efforts (Us and Knives Out)–but I was a little shocked to see how competitive 2017 was! The latter year also gave me four 5 star pictures (One Cut Of The Dead, Guardians Of The Galaxy Volume 2, Happy Death Day, and Thor: Ragnarok), and it threw in a whopping FIVE 4.5 star movies (The Hitman’s Bodyguard [really? I guess I loved it], Dunkirk, Logan, The Big Sick, and Okja).

I actually can’t find a single other year on the ol’ LB where I have given out as many as four 5 star films. So it’s got to be one of those two, even if the 2017 options bewilder me (I’m still amazed I apparently gave The Hitman’s Bodyguard a 4.5).

The reason for all of this preamble is that today’s Blast From The Past review comes from the much-beloved aforementioned 1999, and it’s not a movie I hear mentioned a lot when folks discuss how much they love that calendar year.

Tim Burton was still at the height of his powers in 1999, and it’s with that skillset that he released the horror flick Sleepy Hollow. He obviously cast perhaps his favorite working buddy of all time, Johnny Depp, as Ichabod Crane, and the two were off to the races adapting the old American myth, Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

In Burton’s iteration, Crane is a cowardly and somewhat inept man of reason and science sent to the titular village to solve a string of grisly murders. People have been getting killed, decapitated, and their noggins taken away from the scene as trophies. The locals chalk this up to the legend of the Headless Horseman, but Ichabod is loathe to believe that.

He soon finds out it is true, however, and he has to survive the Horseman’s wrath to get to the bottom of why he has come back to kill again!

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ This movie is surprisingly brutal and bloody. I mean… it IS about beheadings, but I always thought this was a basic PG-13 movie with either mystical or hidden violence. But nope… it’s very much a solid and deserving R. Has Tim Burton done very many other R-rated outings? I certainly can’t think of any. A cursory internet search tells me he did, in fact, make two others out of his entire oeuvre. Regardless, it’s impressive to see him go against his usual grain. I don’t tend to think of Burton as a guy who had this in him.

+ This is a more restrained Tim Burton than you might otherwise be used to. The movie is gothic and dark to be sure, but things never really veer into the realm of being goofy or too stylized. The costumes seem era-appropriate, and the characters have a tic here or there, but they are, by-and-large, very human. Burton is more focused on the story here than on Tim Burton-ing everything up. I’m here for it! In the last many years, Burton’s reputation has suffered as he has released silly pictures like Alice In Wonderland and Dark Shadows. It’s good to be reminded of what he is capable.

– Sleepy Hollow starts off with the promise of being about a man dedicated to the sciences and the physical realm having to adapt to the fact that something magical might be going on. I therefore anticipated a lot of Ichabod butting heads with the residents over the Horseman’s origins. But no… Crane beholds the Horseman very early on and accepts the supernatural aspect of everything happening around him. And while that might be more believable and less plot device-driven, it kind of renders aspects of Ichabod’s character rather pointless. 

– I’m not much of one for mystery stories. When this was just a tale of an undead Horseman attacking villagers and Johnny Depp must stop him, I was into it. But it slowly morphs into a sort of whodunnit to find out who was manipulating the Horseman’s activity. It just felt a bit superfluous at that point, and I kind of stopped caring just a little. I get WHY the story went in that direction–there is more to do with a mystery–but it wasn’t what I necessarily wanted out of the film. 

OVERALL

Sleepy Hollow surprised me both with how gory it was, and how enjoyable it proved to be. I had a darn good time watching this, and it reminded me how great of a talent Tim is when he is somewhat holding himself back from going full Burton.