Apollo 18 review

There’s more than just men on the moon in this found-footage chiller, which purports to be the edited highlights from 84 hours of recently discovered film of a secret lunar landing that went tits up in 1974.

To say more would detract from the nasty surprises director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego has in store for luckless astronauts Warren Christie, Lloyd Owen and Ryan Robbins, if not the crushing boredom that awaits his audience during the excruciating and needlessly drawn-out build-up.

The likes of Blair Witch, [REC] and Paranormal Activity have pretty much sucked this genre dry, something Apollo’s capsule claustrophobia and Alien-themed body horror only goes a short way towards countering.

When it suits him, however, Lopez-Gallego is happy to jettison his central gimmick altogether, employing enough smash cuts, ear-bashing sound effects and derivative scare tactics to make the movie we are watching resemble not so much a clandestine raid on the NASA archive as the corny hack-work of some John Carpenter wannabe.

Whenever its extra-terrestrial entities deign to make an appearance, Apollo 18 does contrive to be both creepy and crawly. For the most part, alas, this only goes to show that in space, no one can hear you yawn.