Joe's Apartment (1996)

Like Weekend at Bernie’s, Joe’s Apartment has a special guilty pleasure quality to it. This was MTV’s first film and, since I was in my teens at the time it was produced, it was a big deal for my generation. MTV has gone on to create countless movies and most have sucked, but there was and still is something special about the initial novelty of Joe’s Apartment.

Perhaps it was because MTV was still hip and worth watching at the time, or maybe it was because MTV was in tune with the current generation’s sense of style and humor, but somehow I connected with this film. It stars Jerry O’Connell, who was popular from the show Sliders at the time, as Joe, a recent college grad looking to make it in the Big Apple. Unfortunately, Joe doesn’t exactly land on his feet. He’s strapped for cash and only manages to secure a disgusting apartment in one of the most dilapidated buildings in New York by pretending to be a dead tenant’s son.

A powerful senator wants to turn the block the apartment sits on into a super-maximum security prison and is using thugs and lowlifes to drive tenants out of the complex. Joe just happens to be the last person in the building and the thugs don’t feel like being friendly about giving him the boot. Fortunately for Joe, his slobbish tendencies and messy lifestyle has won him the affection of the thousands of cockroaches living in the building. Not only do they defend him from the thugs, but they can sing and dance as well.

The biggest source of humor for the film is the antics carried out by the roaches, all of which were animated into the film in all their scenes. They are able to talk and do any number of anthropomorphic actions, but they just keep this a secret from humans, who have long sought to destroy the creatures because of their reputations as pests. Joe and the roaches reach a cautious mutual understanding that is tested several times during the course of the film.

Joe spots a girl in an alley and is instantly smitten. He eventually meets her and they start down the path to becoming an item. Things go awry when the roaches ruin Joe’s attempt at a romantic evening with the girl. She freaks out and runs away. It just so happens that this girl is trying to turn the area around Joe’s apartment into a public park and her dad happens to be the senator with plans for a prison. Everybody ends up at odds, leaving the roaches to try and sort everything out.

The fact that all the roaches were animated is impressive. CGI was still coming along at the time and traditional animation must have taken forever. Also, kudos must be given to Jerry O’Connell for being daring enough to take on a role that forced him to shout at an empty room and at things that weren’t there. It takes a lot to be able to make the situation believable and O’Connell pulls it off nicely. There is never a disconnect where he seems unfocused or lazy in his approach.

Joe’s Apartment is far from Oscar quality, but the original songs by the roaches are cute and oddly endearing. MTV managed to make cockroaches loveable (at least for one film) and showed that they were capable of making movies too. It expanded their entertainment potential and paved the way for future cable TV productions. It’s weird and gross at times (the roaches’ humor is mostly crude) but for those of us who grew up during the 90s, Joe’s Apartment is a part of the nostalgia for that era.

I for one enjoy the film as something of a guilty pleasure, but there’s really nothing guilty about enjoying this film. You just need to have the heart of a teenager for 80 minutes and you’ll have yourself a good time.

RATING: 2.75 out of 5

Scream 2 (1997)

This sequel to the 1996 hit misses the mark by its very own nature as a sequel. While the idea of offering a tongue-in-cheek roast of slasher sequels sounds like fun, the one thing Scream 2 can’t do is validate the existence of sequels. Scream took all the reasons critics of the genre use to explain why horror films are unnecessary but and showed us how entertaining they can be, in effect validating their existence based on the enjoyable nature of their weaknesses.

Exposing the fatal flaws in sequels is done here, but we don’t end up embracing them like we did in the first film. While boldly acknowledging that new characters in sequels are more or less imitations of or stand-ins for characters from the original, Scream 2 still doesn’t warm us up to this fact. It also doesn’t help that through the “established rules of sequels” we lose one of the series most endearing characters- Randy to movie geek. Another problem is that we don’t pick up any new characters that might come back in future installments, which some better sequels do.

Essentially, Wes Craven and his team had to create a mediocre sequel in order to poke fun at mediocre sequels. This time though, the joke is on them.

RATING: 2.5 out of 5