How sad is this?

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Its incredible to me that the best rendition of this amazing story remains a cartoon made by Walt Disney in the 1940s, but its true. Here another clumsy attempt sputters confuses and alienates would be viewers with admirable effectiveness while successfully antagonizing those of us who have actually read the story. Irving's original work is short by any measure and making a feature length film is bound to be a challenge. One can either completely rewrite the story a la Tim Burton which is a discussion for another time, or pad the bust-line of the old girl with unintended detail. The latter is what is attempted here, and if I may say, pitifully so. Unimaginative and thoroughly modern new facets to character personalities such as religious zealotry in Crane or wanderlust in good old Bram Bones ruin the story's intent and betray a severe lack of talent by the filmmakers. By the time the tale's famous climax approached, I had completely lost interest. Its the kind of film where you expect to see a stagehand smoking in the background.

I saw this on TV, as I thought it was Tim Burton's version, which I've seen a year ago and was going to watch again sooner or later anyway; now I feel like watching it more than ever; this junk doesn't do the myth justice, it's way too slow and boring. I don't know how faithful it is to the original story, but Tim Burton's version of the story is a lot more entertaining, accurate or not. I think one of the main problems is, that the main character is not the least bit likable; he seems snobby, greedy and pretentious. Throughout the movie, he was the laughing stock of the town, and he's too stupid to notice it. I hated his character with a passion, and hoped he would be killed off by the headless horseman; I won't reveal here if I was that lucky or not. Overall, this is just your average, bad, made-for-TV movie version of a somewhat well-known story. I know I've praised Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow a lot in this review, but I just need to do so one more time; this movie is nowhere near as good, scary, atmospheric or entertaining as Tim Burton's version. Go watch that instead, and avoid this junk. 5/10

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1999): Not to be confused with the marvelous Tim Burton film that was released the same year, this version (produced for Canadian television) is, at best, a tepid adaptation of Washington Irving's classic story. Unlike the Burton and little-seen Jeff Goldblum versions, which both utilized different takes on the plot, this small-budget translation literally goes by the book, yet it suffers greatly from trying to stretch out the short source material to feature length. The results are incredibly slow pacing and lack of zest throughout, right up to the unspectacular representation of the Headless Horseman. Brent Carver and Rachelle Lefevre deliver as Ichabod Crane and Katrina Van Tassel, respectively, but babyfaced Paul Lemelin is miscast in the role of roughneck Brom Bones. The film's erroneous opinion of itself states that it "captures the mystery and romance that have eluded other screen efforts." Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. 5/10

This film is more faithful to the original Washington Irving story that the Tim Burton movie, but this doesn't make it necessarily more entertaining. In fact, this movie is pretty dull. The unknown actor portraying Ichabod Crane doesn't help a lot, either. (Other actors in the movie are more appealing). Still, if you have read the book, you might be interested to watch this version.