Alien Raiders (2008)

Director: Ben Rock

Starring: Carlos Bernard, Mathew St. Patrick, Rockmond Dunbar

Run Time: 85 mins

Certificate: 18

 

Plot Outline: It's the end of another night at Hastings Supermarket but just as the grocery store is about to close, a bunch of masked and armed men invade and immediately kill several people. The rest are taken as hostages and they assume that their captors intend to rob the place. However their intentions are made more clear when they reveal themselves to be rogue scientists that have discovered and tracked down an alien infestation to the store. Some of the hostages are not entirely human but who?

The Review: Alien Raiders....the first problem anyone should have with this film is the appalling title. It really sucks and doesn't do this film half the justice it deserves. I automatically assumed that it was some sort of cheesy Alien knock-off set inside a supermarket (the sort of thing that Roger Corman would have made in the 80s). But I was totally wrong and gladly so. Using it's low budget to it's advantage, Alien Raiders gives you the feeling of a film with much bigger scope. It has to make do with fleeting make-up effects and relies on a solid script which cranks out a few surprises of it's own.

You need to understand the background to the film first to be able to appreciate it. The director had a budget of around $2m, seven weeks pre-production and then three weeks to complete filming which isn't an easy task. So it's understandable that the film relies heavily on the script and the strength of it's underrated cast as it would have been too time-consuming waiting for a special effects team to work their magic either in pre or post production. Given the time constraints, I think that this film does an amazing job of getting it's story across. Setting it in the supermarket is great as not only does it contain the story to keep the film within a reasonable budget but also makes it quite claustrophobic. It's not rocket science to see that Alien Raiders borrows heavily from The Thing. The whole "someone here isn't who they say they are" spiel still works if done properly. There is a testing scene to determine who is human and who isn't and which is much nastier than simply taking a blood sample as they did in John Carpenter's classic. The scene is nowhere near as tense or atmospheric as Carpenter's but at least you can appreciate the nod and it still has it's own merits. The great thing is that although there are some gory make-up effects on show here, the film isn't about showcasing how gruesome and gory it can get. It's about presenting a good story. The whole notion of this rogue band of ex-scientists going around hunting aliens using psychics to seek them out (and how they became psychic in the first place is also good, adding an element of revenge to their mission) is good and probably deserved to have a bigger scope. Think an alien version of Blade where he hunts vampires down without humans knowing. These people do the same thing only with ET and his friends.