JOE'S APARTMENT (23)

Directed by: John Payson

Starring: Jerry O'Connell, Megan Ward, Robert Vaughn

The Pitch: A fresh-faced country boy in New York finds his new apartment has cockroaches. Forty thousand cockroaches. Who can talk. And sing. And dance. And give him the occasional back-rub.

Theo Sez: Needless to say, among the damnedest things to hit the screen in a long time - but nowhere near as much fun as you'd expect it to be. The gags are mostly pretty lame ("Are you okay, sir?" "Of course not - I'm an artist!"), and the whole thing is so vacuous and half-formed it goes back beyond witlessness to some primeval ooze of humour : jokes like a rock band called Shit are so basic they're barely even jokes, more like a toddler's first hesitant experiments in comedy. None of which would necessarily sink it if it was at least honestly bad - after all, as Mel Brooks has repeatedly shown, true crumminess can have a certain perverse charm ; but its MTV provenance saddles it not just with a flashy style but also a hugely inflated sense of its own hipness. It takes more than complicated wipes and a frantic camera to create visual imagination ; and it takes more than references to Peter Bagge, "Love and Rockets" and a bunch of trendy bands to actually put a movie among their company.