Joe Pesci plays Tommy, a mafia bagman who is tasked with bringing ‘8 Heads in a Duffel Bag’ to a mafia boss within 24 hours. For a man who has held this occupation for years, he is awful at his job. Sure, he’s probably used to only transporting one or two heads and could usually put them in a carry on, but a bagman should know not to travel with an airline with decapitated heads in a duffel bag.
Alas, he does and accidentally switches his bag with Charlie (Andy Comeau), and Charlie goes all the way to Mexico with his girlfriend Laurie (Kristy Swanson) and her parents Dick (George Hamilton) and Annette (Dyan Cannon). Tommy still needs those heads back, though, and this is when Tommy shows he’s not much of a gangster. He “tortures” Charlie’s roommates, Ernie (David Spade) and Steve (Todd Louiso) by whipping them with a damp towel in order to find Charlie.
Sure, that hurts, but I wouldn’t expect a gangster to elicit pain the same way as an obnoxious frat bro. Pesci can’t save the film, as all he has to do is repeatedly tell people to “shut it” in a variety of ways. The film spends most of its attention on Charlie, who learns late in the first act that instead of his khakis, he has a bunch of gangster’s heads. Comeau is just boring and the comedy scenarios are repetitive.
First, his girlfriend’s mother Annette sees the heads and annoyingly screams and reaches for booze. No one believes her about the heads because she’s an alcoholic. From that scene on, the character becomes so one-note and her only job is to freak out whenever she sees a severed head. Even her husband Dick doesn’t believe her. Speaking of Dick, for a movie about heads there’s a shocking lack of blowjob jokes.
The scenario where Laurie learns about the heads is annoying. After she sees the head, Charlie says, “Don’t get upset but there’s more than one [head].” He tells her there are eight heads, to which she screams and runs into the closet. A pair of hotel employees are standing outside and Paco (Frank Roman) says, “White people, they’re crazy.” Hotel employees who had been frequently checking on every commotion, including Paco (Frank Roman), simply says, “White people, they’re crazy.”
You’re not wrong, Paco. He deserves a rib like this at the characters, as the screenplay treats Mexico poorly. There are multiple stereotypes and at one point Charlie calls it a third world country. I don’t know about 1997, but even back then it looks far from a third world country.
At different times, people nearly find out about the heads. This is always convoluted. At one point, a maid takes the heads out of Charlie’s room and a woman puts one of the heads in the washing machine, but she doesn’t know it’s a head because ha! She’s blind! I’m sure she would have been able to tell, because the last time I checked a rolled-up T-shirt does not have ears.
Since Charlie loses this head, he tells Tommy about it when they finally get in contact with each other. Charlie has to meet him at the San Diego airport to get his roommates back, turning this into a terrible adventure as well as a terrible comedy. Tommy, with the roommates (David Spade is the only thing here bordering on “watchable”) has a sub-plot here where they go around trying to get doppelgangers for all the heads. This is only so these three characters have time to kill before going to the airport, and it feels more lazy when Charlie gets the head back the next morning but never calls to tell them.
At one point, I thought that the film could either be better or get even worse if the heads interacted with the characters. Late in the film, “8 Heads in a Duffel Bag” opens that Pandora’s Box in a nightmare scenes where the heads, lined up on a motel dresser, sing a rendition of “Mr. Sandman” (just Mr. Hitman) at Tommy where their respective bodies crash through the walls and strangle Tommy. Suffice to say, the film answers my question by being a different breed of terrible.
This is all in a film that is lazy in its storytelling and comedy. The laziest comedy is an awkward joke there simply for shock value, and the character, Dick’s grandmother Fern (Ernestine Mercer) is simply here for this purpose. When some of the characters are driving along a cliffside, Pesci takes his job of telling everyone to “shut up” too seriously, opens the van door and throws Fern out the window. I didn’t know how to respond. For a second, neither did the characters. Spade asks how he could do that. Pesci replies, “A man can on only take so much, kid.” If that’s the case, I can only take so much and I’m the next in line to be thrown off.
When the main characters Tommy and Charlie share the screen, it doesn’t work. Charlie tries to be sentimental and they share a moment that murder is wrong. The attempt at sentimentality after an utterly ridiculous film feels misplaced. It’s also surprising since it’s written and directed by Tom Schulman, who wrote “Dead Poets Society.” Looking closer at his filmography, he is evidently a one-hit wonder, and the least surprising thing is to know that this is his only directorial credit.
I also must discuss the puns. It saves all of them for the third act when they realized they didn’t hit the quota—and the roommate Steve (Todd Louiso of “High Fidelity” fame) rattles off six puns in a minute because this endeavor literally makes him lose his sanity. His character is awful, where he eventually runs around a parking lot scaring everyone with a decapitated head, the way a flasher does in a shopping mall parking lot. This frantic and strange behavior feels like it could have inspired Tom Green in “Freddy Got Fingered,” and I think that makes “8 Heads in a Duffel Bag” more unforgivable.
