JOE'S APARTMENT
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
(1996) *
See if this makes sense to you. MTV, the network that has given the current generation of teenagers a short attention span and craving for sex and violence, makes a non-violent, non-sexual movie out of something that was originally two minutes long. It is -- to quote the Green Day video they've been playing all summer -- a walking contradiction.
JOE'S APARTMENT, a low-budget, low-plot, low- intelligence and even lower comedy level movie, is based on a very short film that has been airing on MTV since about 1993. In that film, a young man brought his pretty young date up to his place and was about to score when a couple hundred talking cockroaches fell out of the chandelier and down the woman's dress. It was a decent one joke, two minute piece of entertainment.
Now comes the ninety minute version, where we get Joe's life story. He's just out of college and trying to find a cheap apartment in New York City. Some old woman dies right in front of him and he decides to move into her apartment, but the punk landlords want him out, beginning a few rounds of lowbrow harrassment. Also wanting him out of the apartment is a transvestite senator who has bought out the leases of every surrounding building, Joe being the only thing keeping him from building a giant prison on the property.
So Joe moves in and finds out he has a few thousand roommates, a bunch of talking cockroaches who also sing and dance on occasion. He reacts in surprise, digust, etc. but they like him so much he eventually accepts life with 40,000 talking insects. And he meets a woman named Lily who wants to make the delapidated neighborhood into one big garden for the kids to play in before getting shot. Joe, of course, falls in love instantly and -- wouldn't you know it? -- she turns out to be the senator's daughter.
The plot is right out of a hundred other comedies with slightly unique premises driven into the ground. The idea of an apartment inhabited by talking cockroaches has potential but never goes anywhere because the writing is lame and the plot so stale and transparent, not to mention the fact that the Joe character is just plain annoying. JOE'S APARTMENT alternates between petty conflicts with the hoodlum landlords and scenes of Joe trying to find a job or impress Lily. None of it is any good and the only times the movie elevates itself past awful and up to the level of pretty bad are when the cockroaches do their three song-and- dance numbers.
MTV should have realized what they were getting into when they decided to inflate something to almost fifty times its original length and anyone who went to see this should have known better. JOE'S APARTMENT is ridiculously bad, unfunny beyond belief. It gets the one-star rating on the strength of two short sequences -- the song-and-dance number where the cockroaches swim in the toilet and the final sequence, where everything turns out happy and the cockroaches turn the apartment into a charismatic church, complete with pipe organs and a crippled cockroach who is healed by faith. Unfortunately, this crippled little movie is never healed by faith or anything else.
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