Say what you will about this film, but it announces what it is in the title and by God it sets out to deliver. Imagine The Martian, only with pre-Star Trek special effects and a batshit crazy subplot about aliens using other aliens as slaves in their mines and you've essentially got it. It starts off fairly realistically, with a ship orbiting Mars containing two astronauts (one of whom, distractingly, is Adam West, but our hero, Cmdr. Christopher "Kit" Draper, is a largely unknown actor called Paul Mantee) and a monkey (who's called Mona but is played by a male, so has to wear a fur diaper to hide the genitals).
There's an attempt to capture the zero-gravity effects that 2001 later did so well, and some banter about eating all their food out of squeeze tubes. Things are swiftly derailed, however, because they have to drop lower in orbit to avoid a meteor and are captured by Mars's gravity without the fuel to escape. So Draper ejects, to be followed by West's "Mac" McReady with Mona. Draper crash lands and his pod is swifty damaged by a fireball that comes out of nowhere. He finds that he can breathe the atmosphere but only briefly as it is too thin to sustain him. He sets out in his (slim and trim, as befits the 60s) spacesuit, with all the oxygen tanks and food tubes he can salvage, to find shelter.
He eventually finds a cave, and also works out that some yellow rocks can be burned like cheap coal, which is a good thing, because it gets very cold at night. (Of course, in reality, it's -100°C in the daytime on Mars, but our hero gets to swan around in a T-shirt later.) Then he sets off to find Mac. Good ol' Mac - he'll know what to do. Except, of course, that he's dead, with just his beringed hand sticking out from the rubble. After Kit has expended vital oxygen burying Mac,
he gets a fright - some strange furry snake-like thing is moving behind the wreckage of the capsule. Fortunately he's brought along his weapon, which, rather bizarrely, is a very old-fashioned long-barreled revolver, and he advances slowly on the strange alien creature... which of course turns out to be Mona, in an adorable little space suit. First thing Kit does, after claiming to be so glad to see her, is to steal her two tiny air tanks for himself! Fortunately, she seems to manage on the thin Martian air. However, once he gets back to his cave with Mona he has just about exhausted all the air even in the little tanks, and after letting Mona gorge herself on the food in the tubes, he collapses... only to wake up because air is bubbling up through the sand at the edge of his firepit. Turns out that burning the yellow rocks also gives off air. So now (at least once he's set up a system for syphoning the air and pumping into the canisters, along with an alarm that wakes him up every four hours so he can breath from the tank and not get hypoxia), he's solved two problems, heat and air, and has two left: water and food (once he hastily recaptures the tubes from Mona now they're going to live). Well, here's where Mona comes in useful, and the movie takes further steps from realism. However, there are nice, realistic touches. The landscape is gorgeous (filmed in Death Valley at its most alien), and the skies bright red. And his empty spaceship keeps passing overhead every time it orbits Mars, until it becomes too upsetting and he remotely triggers its auto-destruct. This in turn seems to trigger the real craziness that follows, complete with "alien" (he looks pretty damn human to me) escaped slave which he calls Friday,
and the very-similar-to-the-alien-ships-from-the-director's earlier War of the Worlds alien slave-owners' ships that bombard the planet with death rays, and seem to be tracking Friday by his bracelets.
They leave after a while (leaving all Friday's fellow slaves dead), and gradually Kit stops being such an asshole (he actually calls Friday "retarded" at one point) and realizes that Friday isn't a deaf mute, and that maybe he should learn some of Friday's language as well as forcing him to learn English. In fact, they're pretty pallsy by the time the bad aliens come back and really lay into the cave, whereupon they have to use the Canals of Mars (which by 1964 were well-known to be about as real as Piltdown Man) to escape to the polar icecap.
All in all: an odd mixture of 2001 and the worst Star Trek episode, and corny in a lot of places, but oddly beautiful, and strangely not boring, even though most of the film involves pottering too and fro from that one cave. Apparently it was supposed to feature a lot more alien life (and Mona was going to be a furry Martian armadillo), but budget precluded that, and perhaps that's for the best.
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