Plot

A nice guy has just moved to New York and discovers that he must share his run-down apartment with a couple thousand singing, dancing cockroaches.

Joe comes from Iowa to New York and, being short of money, wants to find an apartment with very low rent. His quest is successful, but he must share the residence with some 50,000 cockroaches. The insects turn out to be Joe's best friends.—Dragan Antulov <dragan.antulov@altbbs.fido.hr>

Penniless and straight out of the University of Iowa, Joe (Jerry O'Connell) moves to New York needing an apartment and a job. Joe is mugged multiple times right off the bus, and with each mugging Joe loses a little bit more, until he is left with just the clothes on his body and is out of money. Joe moves to the East Village, where the population is reducing with every passing second due to the exceptionally high crime rate. Joe is still confident that he will get a job as he is a graduate.

All apartments are really bad and still cost upwards of $1000/month. One costs $1500/month and has a huge hole in the ceiling (described a private atrium), one with $1100/month has a rotten floor. Joe realizes that nothing even half decent fits in his budget of $100/month. Walter is an artist and was pretending to be a dead man on the streets and wanted to see how long before somebody checked on him. Joe was the first guy to notice the "dead" body on the streets in 2 days, 7 hours and 23 minutes and Walter took him for coffee. Walter wanted to show how cold and callous the city is to human suffering.

Walter understands Joe's situation and realizes that Joe needs a rent-controlled apartment, where the rent has been frozen since the 1950's. These are places that are hard to find as nobody ever leaves.

With the fortuitous death of Mrs. Grotowski an artist named Walter Shit (Jim Turner) helps Joe to take over the last rent-controlled apartment in the building slated for demolition by convincing everyone that Mrs. Grotowski was Joe's mother. It is implied that Mrs Grotowski was tripped to her death by goons working for a developer Alberto Bianco (Don Ho) who had bought the rest of the block and needed this last building to complete the property. Mrs Grotowski survived the fall, but then has a heart attack just as she is exiting the building and Joe & Walter happened to be passing by. Mrs Grotowski throws her keys in the air, which Joe catches.

Senator Dougherty (Robert Vaughn) wants to empty the building, so he can make way for the prison he intends to build there (the biggest prison in the world and one with maximum security) and uses developer Alberto Bianco and his nephews, Vlad (Shiek Mahmud-Bey) and Jesus (Jim Sterling), to intimidate tenants. Vlad and Jesus are suspicious that Joe might not be Mrs Grotowski's son as he claims to be.

The apartment itself is filthy, but Joe makes no attempt to clean it. Joe is slob himself. He is secretly being watched by cockroaches who inhabit every nook and cranny of the apartment but are careful to remain out of sight. Joe discovers he has twenty to thirty thousand roommates, all of them talking, singing cockroaches grateful that a slob has moved in. Joe piled more garbage into the apartment than was already in there when Mrs Grotowski stayed there.

Led by Ralph (Billy West), the sentient, tune-savvy insects scare away the thugs in an act of enlightened self-interest that endears them to their human meal ticket. Vlad and Jesus come by at night to Joe's apartment to break up everything on Dougherty's instructions. As they attack, the roaches come out in force and fight against the goons to protect Joe. The roaches love Joe. They trip up Vlad and Jesus and threaten them to stay away from Joe. Else every roach in town will turn against them. Joe initially tries to fight the roaches but realizes that fighting won't accomplish anything.

Tired of living on handouts from mom back in Iowa and after a series of dead-end jobs (Pizza delivery, copier boy etc.) ruined by his six-legged roommates with good intentions, Joe finds himself the unskilled drummer in Walter Shit's band. Hanging posters for SHIT. Joe encounters Senator Dougherty's daughter Lily (Megan Ward) promoting her own project, a community garden to occupy the vacant site surrounding Joe's building. Lily works at a government call center taking complaints from building residents regarding deficiencies in utilities and reports of crimes.

To impress Lily, Joe collects manure for her garden, from all over Manhattan. But he is distraught when he sees her hugging someone, whom he thinks is her date or something. Turns out to be her father, Senator Dougherty. Lily is not thrilled to hear that her dad wants to build a prison over her community garden site.

A gift to Lily (all the urinal cakes that Joe had collected at the Yankee stadium as part of his new job) while working on her garden is enough to woo her back to Joe's apartment, when Joe realizes that Lily has no boyfriend, and that guy kissing her was her dad. At the apartment the cockroaches break a promise to keep out of his business and a panicked Lily flees, only to discover the garden she'd worked on has been burned to the ground (work of Vlad and Jesus). During a fight with his roommates over his spoiled romantic evening, the building suffers the same fate as the garden as Vlad and Jesus pour gasoline all over the building and set fire to it.

A mutual truce between our hapless and now homeless roommates leads the cockroaches to "call in favors from every roach, rat and pigeon in New York City" to try to make amends to Joe. Overnight, the roaches scour New York to gather materials to convert the entire area into a garden and take care of all the necessary paperwork to ensure harmony reigns overall. The ownership of the new combined plot is transferred to Joe via the official paperwork done by the roaches through the night. The roaches bring Joe and Lily back together and she loves how he put the garden back together. Joe gives the deed to Lily. The roaches kidnap and confine Vlad and Jesus inside a sewer. Joe moves into Lily's apartment and the roaches follow him there.