Joe’s Apartment

A nice guy has just moved to New York and discovers that he must share his run-down apartment with a couple thousand singing, dancing cockroaches.

• Director: John Payson
• Genre:Comedy / Fantasy / Musical
• Runtime:80 minutes

Cast

Jerry O’Connell : Joe
Megan Ward : Lily Dougherty
Billy West : Ralph Roach (voice)
Reginald Hudlin : Rodney Roach (voice)
Jim Turner : Walter Shit / Voice of Cockroach

Penniless and straight out of an Iowa college, Joe moves to New York needing an apartment and a job. With the fortuitous death of Mrs. Grotowski, an artist named Walter Shit helps Joe to take over the last rent-controlled apartment in a building slated for demolition. If Senator Downing can empty the building, he can make way for the prison he intends to build there, and uses thug Alberto Bianco and his nephews Vlad and Jesus to intimidate tenants.

Joe discovers he has 20 to 30 thousand roommates, all of them talking, singing cockroaches grateful that a slob has moved in. Led by Ralph, the sentient, tune-savvy insects scare away the thugs in an act of enlightened self-interest that endears them to their human meal ticket.

Tired of living on handouts from Mom back in Iowa and after a series of dead-end jobs ruined by his well-intentioned six-legged roomies, Joe finds himself the unskilled drummer in Walter Shit’s band. Hanging posters for SHIT, he encounters Senator Downing’s daughter Lily promoting her own project, a community garden to occupy the vacant site surrounding Joe’s building.

A crappy gift to Lily while working on her garden is enough to woo her back to Joe’s apartment, where the cockroaches break a promise to keep out of his business and a panicked Lily flees, only to discover the garden she’d worked on has been burned to the ground. During a fight with his roommates over his spoiled romantic evening, the building suffers the same fate as the garden.

A mutual truce between our hapless and now homeless roommates leads the cockroaches to “call in favors from every roach, rat and pigeon in New York City” to try to make amends to Joe. Overnight, the roaches scour New York to gather materials to convert the entire area into a garden and take care of all the necessary paperwork to ensure harmony reigns over all. Read more

Watch full Joe’s Apartment online streaming for free