Note to any future filmmakers planning on using that played and played-out horror subgenre, the “found footage” film. Pay attention, please. It’s kind of important if your thriller is built on “found footage” that there be some way humanly possible for that footage to be “found.”

Thus, saying “84 hours” of secret NASA film from a secret final mission to the moon was uploaded to a website — go here, save yourself the ticket price – is laughable if what you’re claiming is that there were cosmonauts and astronauts killed by, um, something on the moon. And the video and FILM footage you claim to have uploaded was left up there with them.

Thus, every scene in the silly and short “Apollo 18″ is simply beyond the reach of that absurd claim.

Not every moment feels like a lie. But plainly, somebody needed to put a little more thought into this notion that we see and hear film cameras used by the astronauts, see color film footage mixed in with grainy black and white (and transmittable) video.

The footage itself is convincing enough. We get an eye full of  convincing, shadowy moonscapes. And we get more than an eye full of what comes out of the shadows after the two astronauts, their Lunar Rover and Lunar Module.

Gonzalo López-Gallego shot this, Warren Christie, Lloyd Owen and Ryan Robbins play the astronauts (one’s in orbit, waiting for the other two to return from  their secret Department of Defense lunar landing in 1974). But screenwriters Brian Miller and Cory Goodman? Didn’t anybody give you a note that said “Duh”? Because they should have.

Whatever merits the production values have, the cheap frights don’t deliver, the performers bring no pathos and the gimmick behind “Apollo 18″  flat out does not work.

MPAA Rating: PG-13.

Cast: Warren Christie, Lloyd Owen and Ryan Robbins

Credits: Directed by Gonzalo López-Gallego, written by Brian Miller (screenplay) and Cory Goodman. A Weinstein Co. release. Running time: 1:18