8 Heads in a Duffel Bag

Tommy Spinelli is a mobster tasked by the incompetent hitmen Benny and Rico to deliver a duffel bag full of severed heads to their crime boss, Big Sep. It's a standard delivery job for the criminal organization, though Tommy clearly dislikes the assignment.

During the flight to Mexico, Tommy's carry-on bag containing the severed heads gets accidentally switched with Charlie Pritchett's luggage. Both bags are similar duffels, and the mix-up happens at the airport when they board the same flight. Charlie's family unknowingly takes Tommy's gruesome cargo instead of their own belongings.

While searching through Charlie's luggage at the Acapulco resort, Annette discovers a severed head stashed inside. Combined with her drinking and underlying insecurities about Charlie, she jumps to the conclusion that Charlie must be a serial killer on the run. Her husband Dick dismisses these claims as paranoid imaginings.

Dick accidentally takes one of the severed heads with him during their travels, not realizing it's in his bag. When airport security discovers the head during a search, Dick is immediately arrested for what appears to be criminal possession of human remains. This complicates Charlie's efforts to resolve the situation.

After Charlie's vehicle is stolen with some of the heads still inside, Tommy realizes he won't have enough heads to deliver to Big Sep. He takes Ernie and Steve to a cryonics lab that has stored bodies and severed heads, where he happily retrieves replacement heads to complete his delivery. The scene highlights the movie's darkly comic tone.

After Tommy retrieves replacement heads and boards a flight back to Mexico, he warns Charlie that if any more heads are lost, he will start taking heads from Charlie's friends or family members instead. This threat is meant to pressure Charlie into safely returning the original cargo and not losing any more of it.

Charlie and Tommy independently orchestrate a plan to bring the severed head to the airport as evidence to clear Dick's name. When Benny and Rico try to disrupt this plan and reclaim the heads, their criminal behavior is exposed in front of authorities. Both Tommy and Charlie work together to ensure the hitmen are caught, leading to their arrest.

Tommy realizes that helping Charlie trap Benny and Rico serves his own interests better. By working with Charlie to expose and arrest the hitmen, Tommy eliminates the people who gave him the grim task in the first place. This allows Tommy to escape the criminal world entirely and retire peacefully in Hawaii, which was his ultimate goal.

By the end of the film, Steve has become increasingly erratic, famously declaring at the airport that one of the severed heads is his "best friend." His bizarre behavior leads to him being restrained in a straitjacket, though he's still present at Charlie and Laurie's wedding. The movie leaves his exact fate somewhat ambiguous but plays it for comedic effect.

Fern, who was previously thrown from a moving van by Tommy, makes an unexpected return at the end of the movie. She shows up at the wedding having been ejected from the van, though Tommy dismisses her insults and angry remarks. This is another example of the film's absurd, chaotic humor rather than serving a plot purpose.

At Charlie and Laurie's wedding, Ernie appears dressed as a brilliant brain surgeon, which is a humorous callback to the movie's central premise involving severed heads. The film wraps up with these character-appropriate absurdities, showing each character's transformation or continuation of their quirks following the chaotic events.