HEAD OF THE FAMILY

Howard is the meanest nastiest thug in town, a Harley riding criminal with an attractive wife named Loretta. Loretta's problem is that she is having an affair with Lance, owner of the town diner and Howard is getting suspicious.

Driving back from one of their nightly flings, Lance witnesses the local family of weirdos, the Stackpools, dragging a man from his truck and into their house. Seeing this as an opportunity, Lance discovers the Stackpools' terrible secret. They are quadruplets, and each was born with one exaggerated human faculty: One is extremely strong, one has extremely well-developed senses, one is extremely attractive, and one is extremely intelligent. The whole family is run by the intelligent one, the titular "head of the family": Myron. Little more than a giant head with hands in a wheelchair, Myron psychically controls his other siblings, but seeks more. When idiotic locals fall for his trap, he experiments on their brains, trying to find a normal body to house his superior intellect.

Lance blackmails the Stackpools with their secret, getting them to kill Howard. He also demands $2,000 a week in cash, since the Stackpools are rich in oil and coal, among other things. Eventually Myron tires of Lance's bottom-feeding, and captures him and Loretta, to get them to destroy the evidence of their secret. To force Lance's hand, he puts Loretta in a mock play of Joan of Arc in the basement, stripping her naked and complete with a burning at the stake. Otis, seeing the "pretty girl" in trouble, carries her off before she can be hurt, and burns the house down. With the Stackpools and Lance dead, the ever scheming Loretta realizes that Otis Stackpool, as the sole survivor, is heir to the family riches. She marries him, inheriting all the Stackpool fortunes and becoming Loretta Stackpool. The ending, however, suggests that Myron is still alive and is controlling Otis from the shadows.

Otis rescues Loretta, burns down the Stackpool mansion, and most of the family—including Lance—dies. Loretta marries Otis and inherits the family fortune, but Myron survives, secretly controlling Otis.

The climax sees Loretta manipulating her way to the Stackpool inheritance by marrying the last surviving sibling. However, the final twist suggests that Myron, the head of the family, remains the true puppetmaster, using his psychic powers to control Otis from the shadows. The ending delivers one last wink at the film’s core conceit: in this family, brains always trump brawn—or beauty.