If you’d asked me, I would have called Apollo 18 a knockoff of Paranormal Activity. But Ben Sachs, who saw the movie after it opened Friday (it wasn’t previewed for the press), has a different take: “An unlikely victory for underground cinema, this low-budget sci-fi feature has less in common with the multiplex fare it’s opening alongside than with the work of experimental figures like Craig Baldwin (Mock Up on Mu), Jim Finn (Interkosmos), and Damon Packard (SpaceDisco One). Like them, director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego replicates archival footage in order to spin a paranoid fantasy about the past: video supposedly recovered from a classified NASA mission in the early 70s shows three astronauts clashing with parasitic creatures on the moon. This isn’t at all scary, but the rough images can be weirdly compelling, the movie’s conspiratorial jive enhanced by the fact that the lunar surface looks like someone’s backyard.”