Weekend at Bernie's - Plot

Plot

Larry Wilson (Andrew McCarthy) and Richard Parker (Jonathan Silverman) are two low-level employees at an insurance corporation in New York City who uncover a $2 million fraud involving multiple life insurance policies that were issued after the death of the insured. They take their findings to their boss Bernie Lomax (Terry Kiser), who commends them for discovering insurance fraud and invites them to his Hampton Island beach house for the following Labor Day weekend. Unbeknownst to Larry and Richard, Bernie is behind the fraud and nervously arranges with his mob partners to have them both killed that weekend and arrange it as a murder-suicide. However, the gangsters double cross Bernie and decide to have him killed instead, citing his reckless greed and his affair with the mob boss Vito's girlfriend as the motivation.

Bernie arrives at the island before Larry and Richard and speaks to the appointed hitman Paulie (Don Calfa) on the phone, to plan out the murders and establish an alibi, unaware that the entire conversation is being recorded on Bernie's answering machine. Bernie then writes a confession and plants cash implicating Larry and Richard in the insurance fraud. Paulie arrives, kills Bernie with heroin and plants it on him to make it appear as a drug overdose. When Larry and Richard arrive at the beach house, they find their boss unresponsive and are shocked to discover that he is dead. Before they can call the police, however, guests start arriving for a "floating" party that passes through Bernie's house every weekend. To Larry and Richard's amazement, the vast majority of people are too engrossed in their own partying to notice that their host is deceased, with Bernie's dark sunglasses and dopey grin from the fatal injection betraying his lifeless state. Fearing they will be implicated in their boss's death, Larry proposes that he and Richard maintain the facade, a notion that Richard finds absurd. Only the arrival of Richard's office crush, summer intern Gwen Saunders, convinces him to postpone notifying the police. After the party, Richard manages to take Gwen out on a romantic walk on the beach, but Bernie's body ends up being carried out by the tide and washes up next to them, prompting Richard to take the oblivious Gwen back to the house and conscript Larry into retrieving the corpse.

Vito's girlfriend Tina suddenly arrives at the beach house, inebriated, infuriated, and convinced that Bernie has been cheating on her. She threatens Larry and Richard with a knife and they direct her to the upstairs bedroom, but remarkably, she also fails to realize that he is dead. At that same moment, another man from Vito's gang is seen spying on the house and witnesses the two of them supposedly making love. Fooled into thinking that Bernie's assassination failed, he immediately notifies Vito, who orders Paulie back to the house to finish the job.

The next morning, Richard is appalled to discover that Larry is maintaining the illusion that Bernie is alive by manipulating his corpse. The two continually bicker about alerting the police until Richard, realizing that Larry is unwilling to do so, attempts to call the police himself but instead accidentally activates the phone message detailing the plot against them. Upon discovering the money and the note, they realize that alerting the police will implicate them. Unaware of the circumstances of Bernie's death, they mistakenly believing that they are still the targets of a mob hit, they decide to use Bernie's corpse as a prop for protection. Paulie, in the meantime, has returned to the island and strangles Bernie's corpse.

The two make various attempts to leave the island, but Bernie's body becomes repeatedly misplaced and recovered in the process. They attempt to board the mainland ferry with Bernie in tow, but are too late to board; Paulie, unfortunately, sees them and assumes that Bernie has somehow survived. They attempt to leave using Bernie's speedboat, but the vessel runs out of fuel halfway through the trip and they are forced to swim back using Bernie's body as a floatation device. Gwen sees them return and angrily decides to confront Richard for his bizarre behavior. Paulie, becoming increasingly agitated and unhinged at the inexplicable "immortality" of Bernie, immediately charters a return to the island.

At the house, Gwen confronts Larry and Richard, who break down and reveal that they had found Bernie dead right from the start, which horrifies her when she sees his corpse. At that moment, Paulie returns and empties a pistol into Bernie's chest immediately after entering the house. Once he realizes that the three are witnesses, he chases them through the house, firing wildly until he is forced to reload. Larry takes advantage and clumsily subdues him with a phone cord and a punch.

The police eventually arrive to place Paulie under arrest for first degree murder, carting him off in a strait-jacket as he continues to insist Bernie is still alive. The film ends with Bernie being loaded into an ambulance. However, his gurney rolls away and topples off the boardwalk, dumping him onto the beach where a young boy comes along and starts to play by scooping buckets of sand over his body.