I know that many intelligent people have praised this film. They are wrong.

Rating: 2/10 (28 January 2003)

Personally, I found the tension so unbearable that I could hardly stay awake.
The more risible something is, the harder it is to parody. Imagine, for example, trying to parody PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE.
What Raimi is apparently trying to do here is to parody moronic and clichéd low-budget splatter flicks. Unfortunately, he has no idea how to accomplish that difficult task, so he just ends up making a *particularly* moronic and clichéd low-budget splatter flick.
(At least, I *think* he's trying to send up the genre. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he simply lacks the imagination to do anything interesting.)
On the other hand, Raimi is also trying to make a truly frightening movie. But the *sine qua non* of horror is that we must *believe*. Blood and guts are beside the point. For the duration of the movie, we must be made to believe that we are watching real people, and that what's happening to them could happen to us. That is the essence of any horror film.
However, since Raimi intentionally (again, I *think*) used the sort of typical cardboard characters and ludicrous plot contrivances which show up in these exploitation gorefests, he lost any chance to make a genuinely frightening film either.
Maybe I'm getting jaded in me old age, sonny, but I no longer find that films like this work (if you can call it that) even on a sheer grossout level. What's grotesque about red-colored corn syrup and cranberry juice? (Contrast THE EXORCIST, during which many viewers get physically ill at the sight of pea soup--because William Friedkin makes them *believe* that it is something else.)
Even the widely-praised camera work is merely a sad cry for attention. It adds nothing to the film, while failing to mask the utter lack of anything worthwhile actually happening on the screen.