Sammi sees life a little differently than most. He sees death a lot differently. He grew up around death. Four generations of Parneses before him were undertakers. In fact Sammi is much more at ease with the dead than the living. The dead don't give him a hard time. What he wants them to do, they do. Until now. Until the live people started interfering with his livelihood.
Now every square foot of land is being requisitioned to house an exploding population and there's no place left to bury anyone. The gates of the cemeteries are all chained shut. And you can't cremate anyone because of all the pollution.
Sammi's buddies in the business are talking about filling barges with bodies and shipping them to South America. Sammi can't go that far. When the bodies start piling up at the Parnese Funeral Parlor and he sees four generations of the family business going under, he comes to the end of his rope. He ties one end of that rope to his leg and the other to a concrete block and dives off the local pier.
On the way to his own end, Sammi comes upon the answer to the burial crisis. Fish swim by him, their mouths popping open and shut, snapping up morsels of food.
Sammi struggles to keep from going down. Everything goes black.
Everything goes white. Through the white mist, Sammi hears voices, sees images of his wife and mother calling out to him. He asks them if they're in heaven, too. They tell him no, he's in a hospital, saved by skindivers.
Sammi jumps up, wraps himself in his bed sheet and bounds out of the hospital, his wife and mother on his trail.
Sammi sets up huge fish tanks and food processing machinery in his funeral parlor. He runs a cadaver down the conveyor through his food processor. It cranks, grinds and hisses and soon meaty morsels pop out of the other end.
Sammi feeds a handful of morsels to the fish in the tank. They gobble it up. Sammi's plan is inspiring — turn corpses into fish food — feed them to the fish in the lake, who when they die, give up their bodies to the infinitesimal life that rides the eternal waves of the living lake. And families of the deceased can visit their loved ones and watch them ride those eternal waves forever.
With fish bowl in hand, Sammi tries to present his proposal to the Commissioner of Waterways, who throws him out of his office when he learns what he wants to do in his lake.
Meanwhile, Sammi's undertaker pals, Eddie and Al, come up with a disgusting but big buck plan themselves. They turn condo apartment buildings into 'Maso-Condos' (masoleum condos). They install burial vaults right in the lobbies of the apartment buildings so spouses can live right next door to their loved ones. An easy sale to little old ladies who have been waiting six months to have their husbands buried. And Eddie and Al find the perfect salesperson in Sammi's mother to help them sell the Maso-Condos to those little old ladies.
In desperation, Sammi sells his concept to the owner of a sport fishing pond — he pays him $500 per funeral. He holds his first eternal wave funeral. Decked out in white robes at the helm of the lead boat in a string of small fishing dingies, he casts the morsels of an old fisherman into the pond. The fish race to the top and gobble up the morsels. Sammi delivers his first eulogy: "Old Joe didn't die, he just went fishing." Everybody cries.
But the next day no fishermen return to fish. The pond owner says: "No more."
Sammi is right back where he started. But the Mayor's sudden death prompts a call from the Commissioner of Waterways. He needs to see Sammi right away.
This time Sammi gets the opportunity to lay his full eternal wave story on the Commissioner. Including the fact that it will be an incentive for people to keep the lake clean to insure the health of everything that lives in it.
The Commissioner still thinks he's a fruitcake but has no other choice. He tells Sammi that two despicable men and a woman sold his mother-in-law, the Mayor's wife, a Maso-Condo. And his wife, the Mayor's daughter, came crying to him about her mother living in one of those places. The Commissioner threatened Eddie and Al with so many building violations they returned his mother-in-law's money. But now his wife was on him to get her father buried.
Sammi assures the Commissioner the Mayor's funeral will be a historical event, ushering in a solution to the burial crisis. The Commissioner agrees — and it won't hurt his campaign to become Mayor either. He shepherds Sammi's morsels through the Health and Environmental Departments.
Eddie and Al find out from Sammi's mother and turn Sammi and the Commissioner into the FDA. Sammi and the Commissioner are summoned to an FDA hearing and Sammi is instructed to bring his fish food morsels in for the FDA's lab boys to scrutinize, certain that the Commissioner used undue influence to get it approved by the local Health and Environmental Departments.
Sammi brings his morsels to the FDA hearing in three little round plastic bowls. He sets them out on the long table in the hearing room. The feds arrive and sit down at the long table opposite Sammi and the Commissioner.
One of the feds dips his hand into one of the bowls, and before Sammi can get a word out, pops some in his mouth. The other feds all dig in, thinking they're snacks. They learn what they are eating when they ask Sammi where the samples are he was supposed to bring. They run off gagging and choking. The Commissioner is sure they'll find them safe now. And they do. Sammi's fortunes take off.
Sammi holds eternal wave funerals on yachts, speed boats, water cycles, rubber rafts and tour boats. In his flowing white robes, he becomes a TV celebrity. Life is great for Sammi now, except for one thing. At several funerals he encounters little girls who tug at his robes and always ask the same question: "Will my grandpa (or gramdma) go to heaven if they're buried this way?" Sammy doesn't have an answer to the haunting question.
One day a sexy lady whose husband dies cheating on her, seeks out Sammi. She doesn't want her husband's morsels dispersed in the lake. She wants them delivered to her apartment. She has a big fish tank filled with big-eyed fish in her bedroom. She feeds her husband's morsels to the big-eyed fish who get to watch the activities in the big round bed next to the fish tank.
Sammi is one of the many frequenters of that bed, but he can't take his eyes off the big-eyed fish watching him. Also watching his comings and goings are Eddie and Al. They own the building the sexy lady lives in. It gives them another opportunity to stop Sammi's ruination of their Maso-Condo business. They call Sammi's wife and tell her.
She leaves a note for Sammi and fires up the food processor. A woman's body moves down the conveyor into the mouth of the machinery. The many bodies laid out in the mortuary seem to watch.
Sammi comes home and discovers the note — too late — the machinery is already spitting out the fish food morsels. Sammi is crushed, he apologizes to his departed wife for becoming just like all the other live people, then drops himself down on the conveyor, moving into the mouth of the grinder.
One of the bodies in the mortuary sits up and rushes over to the conveyor. It's Sammi's wife. She pulls him out of the mouth of the machine by his foot just in time. Sammi has proven his love for her.
Later Sammi and his wife and his mother are down at the beach, all dressed in flowing white robes. There are hundreds of people on a pilgramage to the lake to visit their departed loved ones. Eddie and Al have come to terms with Sammi's eternal wave burials. They sell Eternal View Condos facing the lake so little old ladies can see their loved ones riding the eternal waves right from their balconies.
Sammi beckons to the throng to follow him out into the water to feel, to touch their loved ones. They do. In their sunday best suits and dresses. Sammi is in seventh heaven. He has finally got live people to listen to him.
But then it comes again. That tugging at his robe. He looks down to see a little girl waist high in the water. He waits for the inevitable question. Her mouth opens — and at that moment Sammi sees a duck dive into the water. It comes up with a fish in its mouth and flies high into the sky. Sammi points to the sky and shouts out to all that, yes, while indeed their loved ones do ride the everlasting waves, a part of them surely rises to the heavens above. He reaches down into the water and splashes it high. So does the little girl. Freeze on their hands held high, droplets of water coming off their hands, sparkling in the sunlight.
