When a tow-headed youngster hooks up with a gang of soft-hearted space pirates, the result can only be one thing: tragedy. Or so it would seem from Space Raiders, in which 10-year-old David Mendenhall (of Over The Top fame) unwittingly stows away with the ruffians who invade the planet he calls home, a colonial outpost of the all-powerful Company. Seeking treasure, they meet their new charge with disappointment until, slowly but surely, he begins to win the hearts of the beer-swilling Captain Hawk (Vince Edwards), an empathic, scarf-sporting alien (Thom Christopher), and a ragtag bunch of low-level character actors. But Mendenhall almost immediately proves himself useful by performing a delicate, last-ditch repair job that allows his new friends to escape some vicious stock footage from producer Roger Corman's 1980 film Battle Beyond The Stars. It's cans of George Killian's Irish Red all around after Edwards and his crew make their escape, but there's even more dangerous stock footage to come when the Company dispatches a huge craft manned entirely by evil robots. A layover at a pirate-friendly space station heavily populated by extras wearing Halloween masks provides temporary respite, but also places Mendenhall in danger of being snatched by space kidnappers and held for space ransom. Eventually, Edwards hits on a scheme that will allow him to make a score and return Mendenhall to his soulless corporate planet, and he's determined to see it through, even if it means facing more leftover Stars footage. But he and the boy soon watch one crew member after another die at the hands of their enemies, until only Edwards remains. A laser blast to the chest seems likely to cut his rescue effort short, but as he beerily explains to his new sidekick, "Guys like me don't die. We're too tough. We're too dumb." Sadly, he remains only tough and dumb enough to get Mendenhall home. Then he quietly expires as he sends his young friend off to a future made far bleaker by a brief taste of adventure.
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