Jammin’ at Joe’s
MTV breaks into features with this bigscreen expansion of John Payson’s short.
Jerry O’Connell plays sweet-faced hick Joe, seeking his fortune in the Big City, only to get beat up by hard knocks exaggerated to a ridiculous degree. First he works for Shit (an underground hardcore band), but when he loses that job he has to work for PIS&S (a company manufacturing urinal cakes). He thinks he’s finally caught a break when he lucks into a low-rent apartment (the only one on a condemned block), only to find it infested with thousands of talking, singing, dancing cockroaches.
I didn’t expect to like this cartoonish comedy, finding the premise all too similar to that of Twilight of the Cockroaches (with a bit of Hoppity Goes to Town), but was won over by it’s sense of fun, endless visual imagination, and relentless portrayal of New York as a bottomless pit of filth (the humans are much more disgusting than the bugs).