Three small town layabouts--Eric, Brian, and Alan--are thrust into the alien and disturbing world of the death industry when Eric's distant aunt dies and, on a whim, appoints him as the executor of her funeral. Amid a menagerie of off-center characters--a garrulous, poetry spewing waitress, and unctuous mortician with a bizarre sense of humor, a coarse embalming trainee who used to play in a punk band and whose one claim to fame was a top 40 hit called "Love Banana", and an intemperate mourner keen on planning her own funeral--the three friends learn more than they ever wished to know about the machinations of the death industry and, in the process, are forced to confront their own unexamined feelings about mortality.