Joe’s Apartment

1996

Directed by John Payson

Welcome back to Movie Monday, where we’re continuing our journey down my personal list of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. This week we’re crawling into the grimy world of number 48: Joe’s Apartment, the 1996 musical black comedy that asked the burning question, “What if cockroaches could sing and dance?” Spoiler alert: nobody actually wanted to know the answer to that question.

Now, as always, I want to be clear upfront – this list is based entirely on my opinion. Something I find absolutely revolting might be your guilty pleasure, and that’s perfectly fine. We can still be friends. But if you genuinely think a movie about singing cockroaches represents peak cinema, we might need to have a serious conversation about your standards for entertainment.

The Birth of MTV Films: When Music Television Decided It Knew Movies

To understand how Joe’s Apartment came to exist, we need to travel back to the early 1990s, when MTV was in the midst of an identity crisis. The network that had revolutionized music television with “Video Killed the Radio Star” was desperately trying to figure out what came next. Music videos were still their bread and butter, but executives were hungry to expand their brand beyond three-minute clips of bands lip-syncing in warehouses.

Enter the world of bizarre short films used as filler between music video blocks. These weren’t your typical commercials – they were weird, surreal, often disturbing little vignettes that perfectly captured MTV’s “we’re too cool for traditional television” attitude. One of these shorts was a two-minute piece called “Joe’s Apt.,” created by John Payson in 1992.

The short was simple: a guy named Joe tries to have a romantic evening, but his apartment is infested with talking, singing cockroaches who ultimately ruin everything by swarming his date at the worst possible moment. It was gross, it was weird, and it had just enough twisted humor to work in a two-minute format. MTV viewers ate it up, and the short even won a CableACE Award.

Naturally, MTV executives looked at this two-minute gross-out gag and thought, “You know what this needs? About seventy-eight more minutes of runtime.”

In 1993, MTV Productions signed a deal with Geffen Pictures to develop feature films based on MTV properties, with distribution through Warner Bros. Joe’s Apartment was chosen as their flagship project – MTV’s first theatrical feature film. They handed Payson a $13 million budget and told him to turn his cockroach short into a full-length movie. Because apparently, nobody at MTV had ever heard the phrase “less is more.”

The Fundamental Problem: Stretching a Gag Into a Feature

Here’s the core issue that makes Joe’s Apartment such a spectacular failure: it’s a two-minute joke stretched to 80 minutes. The original short worked because it was brief, punchy, and knew exactly what it was – a gross-out gag with a clear setup and payoff. The feature film, however, had to somehow build an entire narrative around the concept of singing cockroaches, and the results are about as appealing as you’d expect.

The plot, such as it is, follows Joe F. (Jerry O’Connell) as he moves to New York City and takes over a rent-controlled apartment that happens to be home to thousands of talking cockroaches. The roaches are grateful for Joe’s slovenly lifestyle and help him fight off thugs working for a corrupt senator who wants to demolish the building. There’s also a love interest (Megan Ward) who’s working on a community garden, because apparently every bad ’90s movie needed an environmental subplot.

But here’s the thing: none of this matters. The entire movie is just an excuse to show us more cockroach musical numbers, more gross-out gags involving insect bodily functions, and more scenes of Jerry O’Connell looking bewildered while surrounded by CGI roaches. It’s like watching someone try to build a house using only the foundation – technically possible, but probably not going to end well.

The film’s approach to comedy can best be described as “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks,” except in this case, most of what’s being thrown is roach-related bodily humor. There are cockroaches watching roach porn on TV (yes, really), roaches making jokes about their own disgusting habits, and an endless parade of scenes designed to make audiences squirm in their seats. It’s gross-out humor without the humor – just gross.

Jerry O’Connell: Wrong Place, Wrong Time

Poor Jerry O’Connell. Here’s an actor who had already proven his chops as a kid in Stand by Me and was building a solid career with his TV series Sliders. Joe’s Apartment represented his first starring role in a major theatrical release, and honestly, you have to feel bad for the guy.

O’Connell does his best with material that would challenge even the most seasoned comedian. He commits fully to the absurd premise, playing Joe as a likeable slob who somehow maintains his sanity while living with thousands of singing insects. But no amount of charm can overcome the fundamental problem that his character is essentially a straight man in a comedy where all the punchlines involve cockroach behavior.

The timing is particularly cruel when you consider that O’Connell had also filmed Jerry Maguire the same year. Imagine going from working with Tom Cruise and Cameron Crowe on a smart, heartfelt sports drama to… this. It’s like watching someone’s career résumé develop a split personality disorder.

To his credit, O’Connell never phones it in, even when asked to react with wonder to a cockroach chorus line or engage in romantic banter while insects crawl over his dinner. He treats the ridiculous material with complete sincerity, which somehow makes the whole thing even more uncomfortable to watch.

The Animation: High-Tech Grossness

One of the few genuinely impressive aspects of Joe’s Apartment is its technical achievement. Blue Sky Studios, in their first feature film involvement, created the cockroach animations using the same graphics effects engine from Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jurassic Park. The roaches are seamlessly integrated into the live-action footage, and the attention to detail in their movements and expressions is remarkable.

But here’s the problem: just because you can create photorealistic singing cockroaches doesn’t mean you should. The animation team’s skill makes the roaches more convincing, which in turn makes them more disturbing. It’s like watching someone use a Michelangelo-level artistic talent to paint portraits of garbage – technically impressive, emotionally revolting.

The film blends CGI with puppetry, real cockroaches, and stop-motion animation, creating a multimedia approach that should be admired for its ambition. Instead, all that technical prowess serves to make the gross-out gags more visceral and the musical numbers more unsettling. When your technical achievements actively work against audience enjoyment, you might want to reconsider your artistic choices.

The Musical Numbers: Broadway Meets Bug Spray

As if talking cockroaches weren’t enough, Joe’s Apartment decided to make them musical cockroaches. The film features multiple song-and-dance numbers performed by the roach chorus, including members of the a cappella group Rockapella. The roaches have their own musical styles, their own choreography, and their own public-access television show, because apparently the filmmakers thought the concept needed more layers of absurdity.

The musical sequences are technically well-executed – the cockroaches can carry a tune, and their dance moves are impressively coordinated. But watching insects perform elaborate musical numbers creates a unique form of cognitive dissonance. Your brain knows you’re supposed to be entertained, but every natural human instinct is screaming at you to reach for the bug spray.

The songs themselves range from forgettable to actively annoying, with lyrics that mostly consist of roach-related puns and references to their disgusting lifestyle. It’s like listening to a Broadway musical written by someone who’s never actually seen a Broadway musical but has heard them described by someone who finds them mildly offensive.

The Box Office Reality Check

When Joe’s Apartment opened in 1,512 theaters on July 26, 1996, it faced the summer movie season dominated by genuine blockbusters. While Independence Day, Twister, Mission: Impossible, and The Rock were each pulling in over $250 million domestically, Joe’s Apartment managed a pathetic opening weekend of $1.85 million.

To put that in perspective, even other mid-budget releases were significantly outperforming MTV’s flagship film. Jackie Chan’s Supercop earned $16.3 million total, The Great White Hype pulled in $8 million, and even Last Dance and Solo – neither of which anyone remembers – grossed in the $5-6 million range. Joe’s Apartment‘s final domestic total of $4.6 million meant it was beaten by movies that were already considered flops.

The film closed in the middle of August, having lasted barely three weeks in theaters. MTV’s grand entrance into feature filmmaking had resulted in one of the summer’s biggest bombs, proving that translating MTV’s edgy, youth-oriented brand to theaters was harder than network executives had imagined.

Critical Reception: Even Roger Ebert Had Limits

Critics were about as kind to Joe’s Apartment as you’d expect them to be to a movie about singing cockroaches. The film currently holds a 21% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with the consensus reading like a polite way of saying “this movie made us physically ill.”

Roger Ebert, who famously defended Speed 2: Cruise Control, gave Joe’s Apartment one star out of four and seemed genuinely offended by the experience. He stated that the film “would be a very bad comedy even without the roaches, but it would not be a disgusting one.” Ebert then added, “No, wait: I take that back. Even without the roaches, we would still have the subplot involving the pink disinfectant urinal cakes.” When Roger Ebert is calling out your bathroom humor as unnecessarily gross, you’ve probably crossed a line.

Gene Siskel was equally unimpressed, noting that he was bored by the nonstop roach scenes and wanted more development of the human relationships. His comment about wanting “more than just padding between the ‘roach clips'” perfectly captures the film’s fundamental problem – it’s all gimmick, no substance.

The few positive reviews seemed to come from critics who appreciated the film’s technical achievements or found some charm in its complete commitment to absurdity. But even the most generous reviews acknowledged that Joe’s Apartment was an acquired taste that most people would never acquire.

Why Joe’s Apartment Earns Its Place at Number 48

So why does Joe’s Apartment land at number 48 on my worst movies list? It’s not just because it’s gross – there are plenty of gross movies that still manage to be entertaining. It’s because Joe’s Apartment represents everything wrong with high-concept filmmaking taken to its logical extreme.

The movie takes a premise that worked perfectly in a two-minute format and stretches it beyond all recognition, like trying to turn a funny tweet into a three-act play. Every single element of the film – the plot, the characters, the musical numbers, the gross-out gags – exists solely to service the central gimmick of talking cockroaches. When your entire movie is built around a single joke, that joke better be incredibly funny. And singing cockroaches? Not that funny.

What’s particularly frustrating is that you can see glimpses of a decent movie struggling to escape from the roach-infested apartment. Jerry O’Connell is genuinely likable, the technical achievements are impressive, and there are moments of actual cleverness in the dialogue. But all of that is buried under layers and layers of insect-related gross-out humor that seems designed to test the audience’s gag reflex.

The film also represents the dangers of network executives thinking they understand what makes their content work. MTV’s success with weird, edgy short films didn’t automatically translate to feature filmmaking, but nobody seemed to realize that until after they’d spent $13 million learning the lesson the hard way.

Perhaps most damning of all, Joe’s Apartment fails at its most basic level – it’s not fun to watch. Movies can be stupid, they can be gross, they can even be technically incompetent, but they should never be boring. Joe’s Apartment manages to make singing cockroaches tedious, which might be its greatest cinematic sin.

The Silver Lining: Learning from Failure

If there’s one positive thing to say about Joe’s Apartment, it’s that MTV learned from its mistakes. Their next feature film, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, became a genuine box office success later in 1996, proving that the network could successfully translate their properties to theaters when they chose the right material.

The film also helped launch Blue Sky Studios, which would go on to create the Ice Age franchise and become a major player in computer animation. So in a weird way, Joe’s Apartment served as an expensive proof-of-concept for animation technology that would be put to much better use in the future.

And Jerry O’Connell? He survived this early misstep and went on to have a solid career in both television and film. Sometimes the best thing a bad movie can do for an actor’s career is teach them what projects to avoid in the future.

The Bottom Line

Joe’s Apartment stands as a cautionary tale about the dangers of mistaking novelty for entertainment. Just because something is weird and gross doesn’t automatically make it funny, and just because a concept works in a short format doesn’t mean it can sustain a feature-length film.

The movie fails because it confuses shock value with comedy, technical achievement with artistic merit, and brand recognition with storytelling. It’s a film that seems designed to test the audience’s tolerance for insect-related gross-out humor rather than actually entertain them.

In the end, Joe’s Apartment is like its titular cockroaches – resilient, hard to kill, and absolutely nobody wants them in their living space. It’s a movie that makes you appreciate films that understand the difference between being memorably weird and being unbearably gross.

Next week on Movie Monday, we’ll be diving into another cinematic disaster from my worst movies list: The Avengers at number 47. No, not that Avengers… You’ll see what I mean. Until then, remember: just because you can make a movie about singing cockroaches doesn’t mean you should, and sometimes the best thing about a bad movie is that it eventually ends.