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Review: Apollo 18

López-Gallego's inert thriller
By PETER KEOUGH  |  September 6, 2011
2.0 2.0 Stars



After The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, and the Paranormal movies, I just don't think anybody is going to fall for Gonzalo López-Gallego's inert thriller as a genuine record of the last mission to the moon. On the other hand, it might be just dumb enough to be true. Officially, the final lunar manned launch was Apollo 17 in 1972. But what if there was another, secret one, and footage from it was "found" somewhere? As one of the astronauts in the lunar module Freedom points out, the President lied about Watergate, why wouldn't the Department of Defense lie about something like this? Good point, but a bit late. Even after they've set up cameras and motion detectors and a strange "PSD5" unit, the Freedom crew is slow to catch on that something fishy is up, probably because Alien, The Thing, and the other movies this one steals from hadn't come out yet in 1974. Dull, but diverting if you focus on the images' eerie beauty.

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