Calculated to send pedants and purists screaming for the signs marked EXIT - it robs Washington Irving of his nomenclature and very little else - Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow remains frighteningly true to his established methodology. To wit: it looks ravishing even while the plot hangs a little soggy. Undoubtedly due, in no small part, to the director's unalloyed love for all things Hammer: faux-Gothic constructs, enough swirling mist to mask the joins and big boobs busting-out all over. Throw in Christopher Lee in an all too short cameo and you have yourself a ripe old recipe.

All except that, given this is Batman's original helmer and the picture is exec-produced by one Francis Ford Coppola, you can be sure money is never in short supply. Thus it's realised as what one imagines Hammer thought they were doing. Huge studio sets tightly control every leaf and blade of grass, gorgeously crafted costumes decorate its every corner; budget film-making on an epic scale.

And with proper stars. Johnny Depp returns to the Burton fold as Ichabod Crane, transformed from Irving's nervy, pernickety schoolteacher into a foppish New York police constable and nascent forensic psychologist. It's 1799 and after infuriating his superiors once too often, young Crane is despatched up-State to investigate a series of seemingly senseless slayings in the tiny hamlet of Sleepy Hollow. The victims have all been decapitated, the handiwork of the terrifying Headless Horseman, a ghoul much given to wresting the heads of the hapless from their shoulders. Crane, however, is less convinced and determines to rationalise the apparently spectral.

Burton's picture, from a screenplay by Se7en's Andrew Kevin Walker (and tweaked, the publicists seem anxious to let us know, by our very own Tom Stoppard) is not so much an adaptation as a deliberate reversal. In the original, the Horseman is soon revealed as nothing much more than superstition and malicious prank; thundering out of the shadows here, brandishing sword and axe and, in flashbacks, the head of an uncredited Christopher Walken, he is anything but imaginary. And while it makes sense not to adopt Scooby-Doo as your role model ("And I would have gotten away with it, etc, etc."), the rough-hewn whodunit Walker adopts instead does rather make the end both overlong and pedantic. Fortunately for us, the remainder is found to owe as much to Mario Bava and Roger Corman as to its obvious English roots. Carry On Lose Your Head, indeed.

Slight caveats aside, mind, this is cracking entertainment. Depp is terrific as the dorky Crane, all stiff-back and inexplicable cod-British accent; he seems to have floated in from an altogether different movie. Christina Ricci provides a comely and winsome love interest as the daughter of local bigwig Michael Gambon, and the remaining cast draws deeply from the pool of wonderful British and American character actors: Michael Gough, Miranda Richardson, Jeffery Jones, Richard Griffiths, et al. Most, in one way or another, will see their heads roll long before the credits ever do.

Toss in a rollicking score by Danny Elfman, a sparing use of obvious CGI (the exploding model windmill is a treat), and, for this director at least, a surprisingly elaborate plot, and what you're left with is a red-raw adult fairytale that thinks visually and speaks with a camera.