'Apollo 18' likely to disappoint fans of 'Paranormal' genre

I'm not sure how I got it in my head that the new film "Apollo 18" was made by the same people who made "Paranormal Activity" 1 and 2. I guess it must have had to do with the fact that it kind of looked like "Paranormal Activity:" In Space. Regardless, I rather enjoyed the "Paranormal Activity" films, which is why I decided to go see "Apollo 18". (That, and I could not pass up the opportunity to take my mother – who lives alone when I'm at school – to see a film that would likely scare the bejeezus out of her on her "29th" birthday.)

Continuing in the fashion of the "Paranormal Activity" films, "Apollo 18" presents faux documentary-style footage that had recently been "discovered" and leaked online at the website, lunartruth.com. This "file footage" sets the premise that, contrary to official NASA reports, an 18th manned rocket was sent to the moon after the scrubbing of the Apollo space program. Also, like the PA 1 and 2, the cast was very small and only included actors that would not be easily recognizable by the audience. (Unfortunately, for them, however, the "Human IMDB" Chancellor Mills was in the theater and immediately recognized two of the three stars.)

Despite some of these similarities, Apollo 18 fell a bit short for me in some ways. For instance, the film was very short at only about 87 minutes but FELT very long because of the agonizingly slow pace. I would say it was a good third of the way into the film before anything out of the ordinary starts happening, and even when weird stuff starts happening, it's nothing more than just a few rocks rolling around on the surface of the moon. The pace does pick up steam after that, but nothing really exciting occurs until probably the last 30 minutes.

I can't really say too much more about the plot without completely ruining it for whoever is reading this, but what I will say is that the alien monster of this film is actually multiple rocks that turn into little spiders. And, while you may be thinking to yourself that this is not that scary, I'm here to tell you that it's definitely not. It's also not as creepy as the Paranormal films because all of the scary stuff is happening in space, and we do not live in space. Fact. However, "Apollo 18" does make a half-hearted attempt to bring the threat home by saying that a few hundred pounds of moon rocks had been brought to Earth and given out as gifts to foreign nations and had since gone missing or been stolen. (As in, they were given as gifts, turned back into space spiders and have been living among us like Transformers for the last 40 years.)