The stranger a concept is, the more comedy can typically arise from it. The concept of this film has the misadventures of, well, 8 heads in a duffle bag.
Joe Pesci plays Tony, a typical Italian mob hitman in (for him) atypical fashion. His assignment was to bump off 8 rival mob leaders and deliver their heads to his boss as proof that the job was actually done. The job gets done without incident, the delivery however....
As trouble arises on the flight he was taking, his duffle bag is switched from carry on to being thrown in the compartments below. By mistake Charlie (Andy Comeau), a young college student, on spring vacation with his girlfriend Laurie (Kristy Swanson) and her parents Dick and Annette (George Hamilton and Dyan Cannon), picks up the bag which he thinks is his on the recieving end. The hi-jinks only begin once they all, separately, discover the bag's contents. Dyan Cannon puts in a hilarious performance as the first one to discover the heads, and her subsequent paranoia and alcoholic relapse are great.
Meanwhile, Tony finds that the heads are no longer in his duffle bag, the only clue as to who may have taken his is a term paper with Charlie's college address and phone number. When he calls, Charlie's roommate Ernie (the ever-surly David Spade) is less than helpful. Upset and pissed off, Tony makes a visit to the medical college and begins to torture Ernie and the other roommate Steve (Todd Louisio). Their escapades deal with the roommates first being tortured by unconventional means, and then reluctantly help Tony replace the heads with those in the school's cryogenics lab.
It all comes to a crux when the two parties try to meet up with eachother, only to have a much pissed off pair of mobsters chasing after them.
Far from high-brow entertainment, but also not Jim Carrey dick-and-fart jokes. At times clever, at times Weekend At Bernie-ish. In the end it's just funny.