RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d not working - .htaccess

Question

I have seen several other threads about this but for some reason in my specific case the solutions are not working.
Here is the .htaccess
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm
Options +FollowSymLinks -Multiviews -Indexes
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/?$ index.php?page=$1
The desired effect is that index.php will load what ever page is requested in the GET (/events-diary = index.php?page=events-diary) & that works fine.
However I have some REAL directories which need to be accessible for example /admin/
The above .htaccess works perfectly fine as desired on my home computer MAMP, it works perfectly fine on my Amazon Micro, it will not work on the deployment server ipage.com
When you enter /admin it will redirect to the root index. When you type /admin/index.php it works, but you have to specify the index.php
I cant figure out when it seems to be ignoring the !-d
UPDATE:
index.php contains the following PHP
if(!isset($_GET['page'])){
header("Location: home");
exit;
}
$line=page_content($_GET['page']);
note that this functions fine on the other 2 servers, i dont see why it would behave differently on the 3rd.

Answer 1

Use:
Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews -Indexes
With -MultiViews with uppercase V.
For Apache, in some cases upper/lower case are very important

Answer 2

Here is a different set of rewrite rules that might work for you:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/?$ index.php?page=$1 [NC,L]
Are you trying to route things to /admin/index.php? If so, you could create a copy of your .htaccess, upload it to the /admin directory and set the RewriteBase to /admin.
or, if you wanted to turn the rewrite engine off in your /admin directory, you could create an .htacess file that contains:
RewriteEngine off

Answer 3

Difficult to post these suggestions in comment so resorting to an answer.
Try this rule:
ErrorDocument 404 default
ErrorDocument 403 default
DirectorySlash On
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm
Options +FollowSymLinks -Multiviews -Indexes
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/$1 !-f
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/$1/ !-d
RewriteRule ^([\w-]+)/?$ index.php?page=$1 [L,QSA]