She should have given the button to Sean Penn. It's a no-brainer.

Rating: Null/10 (15 March 2010)

Lots of noise and a predictable ending.
The problem with SR is that he isn't particularly bright. Even the basest, most one-dimensional slasher film director knows the cardinal rule that you need victims that aren't too likable, and it helps if they're downright awful, in order for the audience to have some cheap, grisly fun. (What other purpose can horror films possibly fulfill?) But SR doesn't care about that, or is utterly unaware of it: his main character is a fairly blameless, likable, hard-working blonde, hence a poor choice as the victim of an evil curse. It was a poor, illogical choice - unless, of course, SR wanted to annoy the viewers. But considering how successfully, abundantly, and excessively he'd annoyed us with his inept Spiderman films, a change of strategy in this regard would have been well advised.
So confused is the director, that he tried to make the girl less likable - deserving of Hell - by making her ambitious, career-wise. Her "great unforgivable sin" was to refuse the witch's wish to go on ignoring her mortgage payments. (Huh?) Sam, you were a poor, hard-working young director with ambitions of producing daft super-hero flicks once, remember? Does that make you curse-worthy? Actually...
The medium says she'd been "waiting for years to redeem (herself) for losing the boy's soul to the demon" - but how does that fit with in with her demands for a 10,000-dollar cash payment for her failed anti-demonic séance? So basically her feet itched for this opportunity to arise again - but when it does, she places an obstacle by charging a ridiculous amount of money for it. That's SR logic for ya, right there... Those 10,000 bucks could have been put to better use: a tighter script, and with any money that's left over, a lobotomy for the director too.
The brief excursions into slapstick comedy (a-la "Evid Dead") only underline SR's confusion. He couldn't quite make up his mind whether he wanted this to be an all-out cartoonish comedy or a proper horror film.
So what exactly is the moral of the story, the whole point? I guess it must be this: mortgage payments should be optional, especially when it comes to evil grandmas, and anyone who refuses to pay them should keep his house anyway. And anyone who dares stand in their way (an "evil" bank, for example) are immoral bastards who need to die and go to Hell. This, in a nutshell, is SR's value system. (You old Socialist, you...) Or am I a looking too hard into this, expecting naively for SR to actually have a point to make in his Donald Duck movies?
The fact that SR vents all his frustrations on a cute blonde also makes one wonder about his past. His past as a young geek getting rejections left-and-right from the school's cheerleaders. Is SR just a plain old vengeful nerd who can never forget?
DMTH offers a plethora of SR's own 80s clichés. He recycled, pillaged, and ransacked his "Evil Dead" trilogy like there was no tomorrow. Perhaps he had felt that he'd quasi-sold his soul to the Devil by making "Spiderman", hence tried to redeem himself by going back to his young days, his earlier years as a useful director (as opposed to his current state of being a tired imitation of his younger self.) The ending is pitiful. Has any viewer older than three really been surprised that she will get killed in the end? The envelopes had been switched! Wow. A cinematic revolution is nigh...