- 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 right off the bus and is out of money. All apartments are really bad and still cost upwards of $1000/month. With the fortuitous death of Mrs. Grotowski (it is implied that she was tripped to her death by goons working for a developer who has bought the rest of the block and needs this last building to complete the property), an artist named Walter Shit (Jim Turner) (who 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 3 days and Walter took him for coffee) helps Joe to take over the last rent-controlled apartment in a building slated for demolition by convincing everyone that Mrs. Grotowski was Joe's mother.
If Senator Dougherty (Robert Vaughn) can empty the building, he can make way for the prison he intends to build there and uses thug Alberto Bianco (Don Ho) 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.
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 them but realizes that fighting wont 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. 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), where 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 (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 Vlad and Jesus inside a sewer. Joe moves into Lily's apartment and the roaches follow him there.
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