A mother prepares a cake for Big Ed’s birthday, the air in the house warm with ordinary family cheer. In the next room, his son, Ed, quietly tries to clean his father’s hunting rifle to surprise him, but a grim accident unfolds when the gun goes off. The bullet pierces the wall and kills Ed’s mother, a moment that shatters the family's sense of safety. When Big Ed (played by Terry Kiser) returns home and finds his wife dead, he spirals into a brutal break from reality, unleashing a terrifying mood of guilt, rage, and disbelief that leaves Ed reeling and the house heavy with unspoken trauma.
Years later, Ed, now in college, is asked by his father to close up the family beachfront condominium in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina. The place, a kind of informal clubhouse for Big Ed and his hunting partners, becomes the backdrop for a fall break that promises respite but soon festers with danger. Ed brings along friends—Linda, Mike, Ralph, Sue, and Pam—who are eager for a quiet break and a chance to unwind by the water. The mood feels casual at first, with the group joking and planning activities, yet an ominous stillness threads through the evening as if they’ve walked into a trap laid long before.
Unbeknownst to them, Big Ed is waiting in the condo’s basement with a chilling intent. What begins as a tense, unsettling quiet soon erupts into a night of relentless violence. One by one, Big Ed murders Ed’s friends in shocking, methodical ways: Linda is drowned in the pool, Mike is cut open with a boat motor, a police officer is decapitated, Ralph is impaled with a flounder gig, and Sue is gutted with a large fishing gaff. The bodies are hidden away in the basement, turning the condo into a sealed chamber of fear where every sound seems like a signal of danger.
Ed and Pam manage to stumble upon the horrifying evidence as the killer closes in. They hide as Big Ed advances, and when Ed is finally found, a brutal struggle ensues. Big Ed stabs Ed in the leg, but the young man cannot be killed outright. Pam intervenes, stabbing Big Ed and giving them a sliver of a chance. The desperate escape comes when Pam starts the car and drives it toward a concrete wall, forcing Big Ed into a fatal, dismembering collision that leaves him cut in half.
As the chaos winds down, police arrive on the scene. In a desperate moment, a deputy fighting for his life suffers a brutal proximity assault in a shocking turn of violence, ending with his leg being severed before he dies. The aftermath finds Ed and Pam at the hospital, bandaged and battered, but alive, their ordeal leaving long shadows over their futures as they begin to recover and reckon with what happened in the condominium that night.
