November 4, 2013 -- “A Journey to Planet Sanity” is a reality-based, documentary-like romp through a lot of New Age nonsense, like UFO alien anal probes, voodoo, spiritual cleansing, scatological readings, crop circles, 2012 doomsday predictions, etc. It is a lot like a reality TV show, except it is a lot funnier. While all of it doesn't quite hang together and some of it isn't believable, plenty of it is hilarious.

Filmmaker Blake Freeman (“Noobz”) guides 69-year-old LeRoy Tessina on a paranormal road trip, exposing the humbug of mediums, voodoo, and various believers of UFO mythology. It all starts when LeRoy, a pizza delivery man, delivers a pizza to Freeman's house and he mentions his belief in UFOs. Freeman immediately gets the idea of making a movie based on LeRoy's beliefs.

Freeman and LeRoy embark on a road trip to various places to encounter a lot of people with some very strange beliefs. Freeman kicks off the movie by saying “According to the Internet, one in four Americans are considered crazy.” By the time this movie was over, I was more inclined to believe that statement. The idea of these road trips is to show Blake that he has wasted a lot of time and money because of his paranormal beliefs. The trip is supposed to help LeRoy, who has financial problems, and is in danger of losing his home to foreclosure.

LeRoy's main preoccupation seems to be with aliens from outer space and ghosts, which prompts visits to psychics and UFO experts. When you think UFOs, you think of Roswell, New Mexico, a place near a reported UFO crash in 1947 (which was actually debris from a top secret military spy balloon). Roswell becomes part of the road trip, which actually turns out to be mainly confined to California.

Two of the other main characters in the movie are associated with aliens from other worlds, author Don Ray Walton (who wrote a book about being an alien-human hybrid) and a big guy who calls himself Prophet Yaweh (AKA Ramon Watkins) who claims to be able to summon UFOs. These two guys get into some big arguments with each other during one of the road trips. These arguments may not be entirely candid.

One of the funnier scenes in the movie involves a trip to an animal psychic who tries to “read” a horny dog while it is humping a toy dog (there is also a funny out take from this episode while the credits are rolling). Another funny scene has LeRoy visiting a modern day internet-educated shaman who does “readings” based on LeRoy's fecal matter (this is called “scatomancy”). This includes handling and smelling LeRoy's feces. Freeman pointedly declines to shake the reader's hand after the procedure.

There is also a whole unrelated episode near the end of the film in which LeRoy and Freeman try to break into the high-end Los Angeles art market. This whole episode, like much of the rest of the film, is hard to decipher in terms of determining how close it is to a real documentary and how much of it is a structured performance. There is a crop circle gag, for instance, which is very funny, but not very believable.

It appears that some of the people in this film were paid for their appearances, while others may not have been. This raises a lot of questions about how the film was financed, to what extent was some of it staged, how permissions were obtained for filming, methods of transportation, etc. For instance, Freeman engages in a bunch of stunts, some of which appear to be staged, to prove that a voodoo curse can't hurt him. The funniest stunt shows him running with scissors. Another stunt has him running from some neo-Nazis in a pink tutu.

This movie would have us believe that LeRoy abandons his strong beliefs in UFOs and ghosts with a few simple demonstrations. These kinds of beliefs, like religion, New Age beliefs, beliefs in conspiracy theories, are not that easy to change. Often, these beliefs are highly resistant to facts and logic, and if these beliefs do change, that can take years. Yet, at the end of the movie, we're to believe that LeRoy is cured of his paranormal beliefs in a short period of time, and that his other problems are solved, with Freeman's help.

This movie does touch upon established religion at one point, the Christian religion, to be exact, but it carefully skirts the whole question of whether or not most established religions are yet another class of hustles which serve to separate believers from their money. This is a comedy, and a very funny one, but it doesn't seriously address the whole issue of people wasting their lives on beliefs that are, by their very nature, unprovable. It comically pokes some holes in a few, but by no means all, paranormal and superstitious beliefs (for a lot more daring comedic exposés of supernatural and paranormal practitioners, see the many relevant episodes of the Penn and Teller TV show, “Bullshit!”). This film rates a B.

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