All is quiet and normal in a supermarket in Bucket Lake, Arizona, until a bunch of masked and highly armed people marches in and starts a peculiar kind of assault. It's not your usual hold up, though - the perpetrators under their leader Aaron Ritter (Carlos Bernard) aren't out for money, they are looking for people infected with an alien parasite and they're convinced that the alien "king" is inside of someone in the market.
Aaron had planned on getting in fast, letting the only one of them who is easily able to recognize the infected identify the alien, killing him or her and getting out again. That plan goes out of the window when the spotter is killed by a cop. Now more radical measures are necessary to find the alien. Too bad the police is already arriving outside.
As long as you are able to ignore the terribly generic title, Alien Raiders does a lot of things right. It's the surprising case of a Direct to DVD low budget film that's trying to emulate many of the virtues of classic B-movies - short run time, tight if not original plotting, solid acting, these kinds of things. It's the old-fashioned way of not having money for much, but trying to do the few things one can afford right (instead of doing them lazy, but calling it ironic).
That's not a way to win Oscars, or make a deep metaphorical statement about the nature of existence, but works out nicely as a really entertaining genre piece one can watch and enjoy and recommend.
The script has it's flaws - some people will be annoyed by the lack of exposition (I see it very definitely as a plus - you don't have to explain every detail in this kind of set-up), others by the glaringly obvious twist ending. I didn't mind the ending all that much - I'm always willing to ignore the too obvious when the pacing leading up to it is right.
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