With a title that is designed to be sexually titillating but comes off as silly, Devil Girl from Mars treads a fine line between a classic film and a grade-z potboiler.

     The story takes place at an inn in the Scottish Moors (a setting shared with the earlier, and similarly moody,  Man from Planet X), where an assemblage of various characters find themselves: an astrophysicist, a reporter, the quaint locals, a cosmopolitan actress, a young boy, an escaped convict and the young barmaid who loves him.  When a spaceship lands out on the moors, all become trapped  behind a forcefield  isolating the grounds of the inn.  Soon they are visited by the leather-clad 'devil girl' Nyah, a stern, frosty-cold dominatrix from the planet Mars.  

     She's come from the Red Planet in search of male breeding stock to repopulate her dying planet (sort of a role reversal of Mars Needs Women).  While her ship is repairing damage sustained in the Earth's atmosphere, she deals with the intrasigent humans, who know that, once she returns to Mars, the wholesale invasion of Earth will begin!

     A fundamentally strong production diminished only by certain weaknesses in the script, Devil Girl from Mars works on many levels.  Impressive art direction, good design of the spaceship and the robot Chani (pulling off the Gort-like power while looking much like a walking refrigerator)are successful; Patricia Laffan steals the show as the Martian ice princess.  Some of the standard melodramatics, awkward exposition and stock characters slow things down, but there's still a lot here to enjoy.  

     The cult status this film enjoys is probably do mostly to the camp aspects that are implied by the title (but which, strangely, don't really appear in the story), and the lesbian/dominatrix overtones in the character Nyah.  Overall, however, the film is a fairly tame one, boring in parts, but with some standout scenes.