For every Citizen Kane there’s a Happy Gilmore and for every Destination Moon there is a Flight to Mars. Clearly hopped up on happy juice and maryjane, the creators decided that credibility was a luxury they couldn’t afford. Ripping up any attempt at believability and throwing it out the window, they then went outside and stomped the scattered remains into the dirt. The result is a film containing such credible concepts as having a journalist on a rocket trip and mini-skirted aliens.

Flight To Mars is about a rocket crew who crash on Mars and discover a race of... Martians! They look and talk just like us, but have Martian names like Ikron, Telamar and Ken. Oh sure, they seem nice enough at first, willing to help them repair the ship and get them safely back to Earth. But like all two-bit fourflushing no good dirty Martians, they’re really hell bent on taking the crashed rocket for themselves, taking over Earth, then the solar the system then the whole UNIVERSE! MWUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!

Where to begin describing some of the finer points of this film? How about the crew sitting around in the rocket in their khakis and leather jackets having sandwiches for lunch, smoking pipes, and enjoying campfire quality philosophical discussions? The crashlanding on Mars is a hoot. One moment the rocket is flying along, the next it is stuck - looking like a dart thrown at a mountain. The crew's suits for Mars are like parachuting overalls, whereas the aliens recycle the space suits from Destination Moon.

The film stock has suffered from some degradation, causing the picture to often be very green or blue. That's except for the faces, where everyone looks to have extremely healthy glowing tans. The full frame picture is often dark and murky (although brightness levels can vary across a scene) with very low detail in the shadows. The transfer itself is far from perfect, but did you think this was going to get the royal treatment? No, I didn't think so. Trust me, if you enjoy watching these kind of films, you'll probably be thankful that we can get it on DVD at all. And if the variable colour of the film is a problem, just turn the colour down on your set and watch it in black and white. It worked for me the second time around.

By now you’ll expect that I’m going to say the audio is in DD2.0 mono. Well you’d be right. It is. The quality is about what you’d expect from a video tape. I preferred the result of playing the film with pro-logic decoding as it made it a little clearer, and as there's no stereo seperation to worry about a single channel works fine. Dialogue sounds fine, but you'll be too busy looking at how short some of the miniskirts are to worry about what they're saying. Shakespeare this isn't.

The only extra features on the DVD are one trailer for the film, and eight and a half minutes of trailers for other old sci-fi films, some of which are also in the Retro Sci-fi DVD Collection. These are shown on a drive-in themed screen to keep it all in the mood. Although this seems like a good idea, and they should get points for trying something different, I personally would have liked to see them individually accessible and played fullscreen. Still, they are what they are, and that’ll have to do. Life shall go on.