With all this laudatory talk of the best of the year and Nelson Muntz-style “HA hah”-ing at the worst, isn’t it time to spare a thought for all the films in between, the ones that are neither remarkably good nor jaw-dropping awful? 2011 saw hundreds of films hit theaters, some only on offer for a week or two before being shunted off to other platforms, others providing an adequate or mildly disappointing few hours of entertainment at the multiplex. But just because a movie is middling doesn’t mean it can’t have some memorable, even exceptional scenes. Here are five from flicks that likely won’t be on many year-end lists, but that still deserve a second look. Paranormal Activity 3 : The babysitter in the kitchen The third installment of this lo-fi horror series took its suburban surveillance shocks back to the ’80s, but otherwise kept to the familiar formula of grainy footage, door slams, strange noises and vague demon mythology. The one exception? A camcorder mounted to the base of a rotating fan, slowly turning between the kitchen and the open living room of the haunted family’s California tract home, allowing for spooky scenarios to develop between the two places as we are kept to the automatically toggle of the unmanned camera. In the best sequence, a babysitter does her homework at the kitchen table, unaware that in the other room a figure wearing the sheet she had used to tell her charges a ghost story has appeared, the camera swings slowly away, and when it turns back the would-be specter is directly behind her. It’s an amazing example of how timing and a sense of space can make something simple into something improbably frightening.
