This movie can be summed up in one word: BORING. Boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring!

To outline the plot: four astronauts (including a woman named Dorothy) crash on Mars while attempting to do something (I think they were mapping the surface); they get out and start walking, hoping to find the "main stage," or "MacGuffin." They walk (and raft, sometimes) for most of the movie. Then they find a city. They walk some more. They meet John Carradine's floating head. He blabbers on and on and on and finally tells them that they are trapped, along with the Martians, in a time warp. To get free, they have to find a small snow globe with the city inside and stick it in this giant clock. They do so, they escape the collapsing city, they wake up on their spaceship -- wait! It was all a dream! Or was it?

You probably think I'm leaving out details, subplots, character development, right? I'm not. That is everything that occurs in this movie. Just read the detailed breakdown below.

Credits: 2 minutes. On the spaceship before the crash: 10 minutes. Crash: 0 minutes (occurs offscreen). Arguing about what to do: 4 minutes. Rafting outside: 5 minutes. Rafting in caves: 5 minutes. Walking in caves: 11 minutes. Walking outside: 5 minutes. Standing, sitting, and talking by the abandoned space probe: 6 minutes. Following the yellow brick road: 4 minutes. Wandering in the city: 10 minutes. Talking with John Carradine: 10 minutes. Finding the globe, inserting it in the giant clock: 4 minutes. Fleeing the city: 3 minutes. Wrap-up (back on the spaceship): 2 minutes.

Total time elapsed: 81 minutes. Total worth of that time spent doing *anything* but watching this movie: priceless.

The driving force behind the plot is the astronauts' search for their "main stage." We never find out why they need to find it, or why they can't stay with their crashed spaceship. When Dorothy asks, "What's to stop us from sending a Mayday call now?" Charlie replies, "Nothing, technically." Yet they still don't do it. We never find out what made them crash. They don't think to ask John Carradine about it (Doc explains it to Carradine as: "Our craft encountered an invisible but solid magnetic force in your atmosphere").

There are some great bad lines, to be sure. As their spaceship crashes, Steve warns, "The hull may rupture on impact." While they wander through the caverns, Charlie opines: "I almost wish this weren't the right direction." John Carradine endlessly spouts meaningless profundities, and there are some other absurdities that are good for a laugh now and then: the sight of our brave astronauts inching carefully along a cliff that is easily three feet wide, the "eerie" music on the soundtrack, the Martian they meet who has a light bulb in his head and looks like one of Mr. Roger's hand puppets, and Steve picking up the snow globe that will help them escape the planet and then accidentally dropping it immediately. But the payoffs are too few and far between to make this anything like a worthwhile investment of your time.

Rating: half a turkey. It gets half a turkey for the bad lines, another half for conning John Carradine into letting them use his head, and then loses half a turkey for letting spastic nutcase and comic relief Charlie live.

Scene to watch for: They all fall asleep sitting upright in the rafts, and some white plastic tubing attacks them. Try and count how many shots Charlie fires from his rifle in this scene without reloading. I think I counted 20.

Best line: "On what we now believe to be the morning of the fourth day, we have emerged from the fiery depths of the Martian underworld. How long we have been wandering there, we can only guess."

Things that make you go "Huh?": Who thought they could get away with calling this a "movie"? There's hardly any movement at all, unless you count the stock footage of the volcano.