Joe’s Apartment Blu-ray Review: Riding Cockroaches Into the Sunset

Joe’s Apartment is a black comedy/musical/romance written and directed by John Payson. It stars Jerry O’Connell as down-on-his-luck New York transplant, Joe. He is struggling to find a place to live when the last member of a rent-controlled apartment complex kicks the bucket and Joe is able to, somehow, convince everybody who matters that he is the son of the dead woman and the rightful owner of the apartment.

Unbeknownst to Joe is that his apartment is infested by twenty- to thirty-thousand talking, singing cockroaches. Also, his love interest, Lily Daughtry (Megan Ward) is the daughter of Senator Daughtry (Robert Vaughn), who owns the apartment and plans to get Joe out by any means necessary in an attempt to build the world’s largest prison in its place. Lily, on the other hand, would like to build a beautiful community garden where the prison is planned. Goons have been hired to help push Joe to the street even if it means arson or murder is on the table, and they are.

Just when you think Joe is done for, the talking cockroaches who live in the walls come to his rescue. They like Joe because, while looking like a supermodel, he is supposedly dirty, and gross, and never cleans anything. There is no indication given as to why someone like Lily would come anywhere close to him, especially after the cockroaches break a promise to Joe and frighten Lily when she comes over for a first date.

Joe’s Apartment started as a short film on MTV also written and directed by John Payson. It is mostly silly songs, short sketches, skits, set pieces, double entendres, and puns. Every time a story begins to bubble out of the morass, the cockroaches are there to sing their way into a new scene that will not go anywhere either.

Special Features:

• WB Cartoons: “The Lady in Red,” “From Here to Eternity,” and “Superior Duck.”
• Original Theatrical Trailer

Will Joe get along with the cockroaches? Will he get the girl, and the garden, and the job, and the riches? Some singing, dancing cockroach will answer all these questions before scurrying back into the darkness where it belongs.