Joe's Apartment

We happened to notice this on the TV in the video store one evening, and decided we had to have it. Unfortunately for the poor shop assistant, she was in the middle of watching it and had to take it out of the VCR to rent it to us. Turned out to be a great choice, even though I hate cockroaches! A marvelously silly, feel-good film. Yes, of course it has a standard plot-by-numbers plot-line, but it's rare to find a film that doesn't these days. What's even better is that the shops think it is a bad film, so the DVD is very cheap. Go out and buy one!

This movie was on TV one day and I was bored, and tired so I just watched about 10 minutes of it. I was DISGUSTED. The bugs living with him creep me out, the disgusting-ness of his apartment. It's too hard to watch. I didn't finish it. I kinda felt like crying the whole time I was watching. It might just be the fact that I'm not a bug person and the whole idea just grossed me out, but who in their right mind who like a movie like this? I don't even know why they would put it on T.V! The only thing that was slightly enjoy-able was the voices of the roaches. It made me laugh, but seriously! I shudder thinking about it! This movie haunts me. I swear to god. Don't see it.

The only reason I'm even commenting on this piece of rubbish is that it's the only film I've ever walked out on. 30 minutes of watching this attempt to stretch a clever segueway commercial into a film was enough. Inauspicious beginning, MTV Films!

Spoilers herein. This is successful in one dimension. And since few films even have that, perhaps we should celebrate. What stinks is all the normal mix of what usually makes a film: the story (particularly the humor in the story), the acting, production and so on. But what works is a relative lack of constraint in what happens with the bugs. The Disney organization established a code which has become dogma. It sets pretty severe constraints on what a cartoon character can do in terms of bending reality or the normalcy of behavior. So Donald might get mad, but he doesn't turn himself inside out. Goofy's nose might get stretched, but he does have a nose. Walt's supposition was that the characters were surrogates for real people and if you break that wall, you bring into question all of the dramatic and comedic conventions he appropriates from real life. Essentially everyone follows this rule, and has thrived. The alternative world of animated creatures has a predictability to it. Ah, but that wall of expectations is a matter for humor too -- rare humor -- humor of the Marx Brothers variety. And here we have a Lenny Bruce-like piercing of the wall. Its outrageous in just the sort of way that South Park sometimes was. The Busby Berkeley routines really had me. It ran out of steam well before the end. So just turn it off after the apartment gets destroyed. Ted's evaluation: 2 of 4 -- Has some interesting elements.

"Joe's Apartment" is a feature-length adaptation of a short film previously seen on MTV. Joe is played by Jerry O'Connell, who had the lead whiz-kid role in the TV series "Sliders". His girlfriend Lily's father, a scheming congressman afflicted with deviant sexual fetishism (and therefore obviously a Democrat), is played by the remains of Robert Vaughn. But of course the real stars are the hordes of digitally animated cockroaches who infest Joe's NYC digs. They not only talk, they also sing, dance, and do synchronized swimming in the toilet. Joe, an Iowa innocent new to the Big Apple, is horrified when the bugs take a liking to him because he's their kind of slob. But his new "friends" are impossible to get rid of, just like in real life, so Joe just has to make the best of the situation. Otherwise, the plot is dumb to the point of irrelevance: the congressman wants to level Joe's building, the last one on its East Village block, to make way for the vast new Manhattan Maximum Security Prison (which makes him a Democrat who's caved in to Republican priorities -- again, just like real life). But Lily wants to make the block into a park-like garden. See? Just the sort of tooth-grindingly stupid drek that begs to be livened up by swarms of wisecracking, punning, music-loving arthropods. As silly fun, it works quite well, and would make an interesting second feature after "Phase IV," a dead-serious 1974 SF effort about a colony of intelligent ants in the Arizona desert.

Joe (Jerry O'Connell) is a naive wide-eyed fresh off the bus Iowan. He gets robbed right away at the New York bus station. He befriends the strange Walter Sh1t. He gets a rundown cockroach-infested apartment. Thugs are intimidating tenants to clear out the building for Senator Dougherty (Robert Vaughn). It's the last piece before he can build a giant prison. The cockroaches find a viable roommate in the messy Joe. Joe falls for Senator Dougherty's daughter Lily (Megan Ward) who's working on a community garden in the neighborhood. This is aggressively disgusting. It's very distracting. Even without the roaches, this would be a bad comedy. The roaches are more appealing than O'Connell. With them, I can't possibly concentrate on the jokes. It wallows in disturbing images. The close-ups are especially bad. There are people who like outsider tastes. This one takes it too far.

Joe has graduated from college and is moving from Iowa to New York City. He actually believes he can find a decent apartment and a good job, but the apartments that rent for $1000 a month are not fit to live in. Fortunately, he meets Walter, an artist, whose latest project is to lie on the street in a pool of blood and see who notices. For two days, only Joe does. Walter tells Joe about rent control, and Joe is lucky enough to be there when the resident of one rent-control apartment dies. But the apartment Joe finds is no prize either, even though he can afford it. Hundreds or even thousands of roaches live there. Talking roaches. And the building is the last one left in an area where Senator Dougherty wants to build a federal prison. Only Joe is left in his building, and he is harassed to the point where most people would move out. The roaches encourage Joe to stand his ground and even help him out. When Joe calls 911, the call is answered by Dougherty's frustrated daughter Lily, who has taken charge of a community garden in Joe's neighborhood and wants her father to leave things as they are. Lily doesn't like her paying job because all she can do is put people on hold; there's no one to switch them to (I did like the nice music that was played). If you don't like 'Fear Factor', this movie might not be for you. But the roaches were so cute I wasn't really disgusted (even by their slightly off-color language). And they were quite talented. I liked most of their songs, which tended to be older music styles. They even did dance routines, including an Esther Williams style performance in a toilet. This movie was very funny at times. Some of the humor tended toward the demented, but I still enjoyed it.

As someone who usually appreciates the absurd and likes many "black comedies," I was a little disappointed in this one. I mean, showing cockroaches who talk and sing sounded hilarious, so I rented the VHS shortly after it came out, but didn't find the dark humor as good as I had hoped. Somebody told me this film was really gross, but I didn't find that the case. It's not bad in that department. It just isn't as funny as you might hope. Also, let's be honest: how many people want to look at cockroaches for over an hour? How many want to see one for a minute? Not many. Cockroaches have to be one of the most disgusting creatures on earth. Yet having the guts to make a movie about them, and having them sing and dance, especially in a Busby Berkeley-type number, is pretty outrageous and deserves an "E for effort," as the saying used to go. I think this would have been more tolerable, and funny, had it been a short film, something around 20-30 minutes. It might even have won awards for "Best Short." but the "joke" begins to wear thin after awhile. Still, if you are looking for something TOTALLY different and you are hard to offend, look no further!

This movie tries very hard to be strange and "zany" (the word used by boring people to describe mundane, outmoded comedy that they have just been introduced to but the rest of the world has become jaded to many years previously). This is an old, crusty splatter of teenage, cartoon ejaculation dried and forgotten on a dirty bed sheet badly in need of a washing. In other words... who cares? Not me. If you care about this film, I suggest you beat yourself in the head with your "Saved by the Bell" VHS collection until puberty sets in. Endless annoying Chipmunk songs sung by a chorus of poorly made cockroach puppets doing idiotic choreography is not entertainment. In fact, it's not even "Meet the Feebles" which is a masterpiece of cinema in comparison. This movie tries SO hard to be weird that it's painful. Oh, the pain. MY EYES!

This movie is pretty funny. What it lacks in intelligence, it makes up for in fun. Joe(O'Connell)has just to New York City and into his first apartment. The only problem: it's infested with thousands of talking cockroaches. They all seem to be a pain in Joe's butt, but the roaches come in more useful for him than he thought. This movie is no classic, of course I don't think any of MTV's movies will be considered classics. But they are really funny(also see Beavis and Butt-Head Do America and Dead Man On Campus). It's a hilarious and fun little flick, even for people who don't like bugs. 8/10