Plot Holes Galore!

Rating: 4/10 (15 February 2011)

Sam Raimi's very first film seemed to get a pretty strong fan-base, so I decided to check it out. While the movie is scary at times, it is also insanely predictable and the characters are so stupid that it's astounding.
The premise of this movie, while it seems somewhat like the Exorcist in the sense of the demons infecting living bodies, is pretty creative for the time. Basically, cursed words are spoken while a group of teenagers (or young adults, I can't really tell) are at a isolated mountain cabin and this wakes up demons which inhabit the bodies of the living. While the premise is pretty interesting, it is very formulaic. First off, there are FIVE friends as the main characters, the main character is a quiet, reserved guy, there's the arrogant, "I can do anything" type friend, and for Christ's sake, they're young adults ALL alone in the mountains in a small, creepy cabin. This movie just screams the HORROR genre. To the movie's credit though, the characters were picked off in an order I didn't expect, so it's not completely formula Horror style.
Let's get right into this, plot holes and characters' decisions are the big downfall of this movie. I don't know if I ever rolled my eyes so much when watching a movie. There are a ton of them, so I list the ones I can remember. First off, why does the guy from the past on the tape actually say the cursed words that summon demons? Was he trying to bring horror to a bunch of random people in the mountains? I'd think that they be on a level beyond swear words, like since swear words are said on occasion when you're really mad, these words would never be said because they bring about the freaking apocalypse. Next, after they realize that the only way to get rid of these demons is body dismemberment, why don't they just take a shotgun to evil Cheryl's face then chainsaw her in pieces? This also brings up the question, why didn't evil Cheryl break out earlier? She showed at the end of the movie that she could just break the lock on the cellar, so why didn't she break out and sneak up on them when they weren't looking and just kill them all? It's obvious that that was the demon's goal was anyway, so why put it off? Then, once stupid Shelly becomes demon person number 2, the arrogant character seems to know what the hell he's doing and starts trying to kill her in many different ways, but the main character is just standing on the sidelines holding a dang ax doing nothing while his friend is beating up, and getting beat up by his girlfriend. Where the heck are this guy's balls? He knows that this isn't the same chick that he knew, so why doesn't he just help him out? You know this would be a great time for Cheryl to "surprise" her brother. Then the friend has to take the ax from him to kill Shelly for good. During this whole time, Linda has been snoozing up a storm not batting an eye. Why? Wouldn't she hear a demon screaming in the other room? Then Linda wakes up as demon number 3 after being stabbed by a pencil by Cheryl. This begs the question, how come Ash can have their blood all over him but not turn into a demon and Linda can just get stabbed by a pencil, not even like physical contact with the demon, and become infected? Then, once Ash finally seems like he's getting some balls and is about to dismember his girlfriend with a chainsaw, he stops because he looks at a necklace which holds no significant value, except that he gave it to her. Doesn't he know that she'll just come back as a demon and try to kill him? And on that note, for a large portion when Linda is a demon she just sits and stares at him and does nothing at all to try and kill him. Why? He's already dealing with another demon so why not just double team him to take him down? That was their goal, so why not set out to accomplish it? Skip ahead to the end, and all it takes to bring these guys down is to destroy a book that they found in the basement. If that's all it took, then why didn't he do it earlier? Nothing told him at that very moment to burn the book, so that tells me that he knew about this beforehand, so he could have just ended the crisis from the start by just burning it when Cheryl became a demon. Then in the last shot we see that everything seems fine and resolved, but then something comes up from behind and scares Ash white. What was it? It couldn't have been a demon, or at least it shouldn't have, because he burned the evil book, which seemed to do wonders to the other two in the room at the time. Maybe it was a scarecrow. I assume that we're suppose to believe it is another demon, but that doesn't make sense given that their book was destroyed. Maybe it was explained in the sequel, but the ending just doesn't make sense to me at all.
There are tons of holes in this movie, and I don't get how people can just sit through all the BS that these characters do. I've heard the sequel is better, but I'm not going to hold out much hope given how disappointed I was with this one.