Upon getting out of prison, a man who took the rap for some thief buddies gets together with them again, and tells them he's not interested in doing things with them any more. They stick a dead body in his trunk, unbeknownst to him, and he roars off to find his future. Unfortunately, they forgot to get the key they need off the body, so they're chasing him. Meanwhile, a mafia kingpin's daughter is trying to kill the hitman that killed her father, but her grandmother is trying to make peace with the family that hired the hitman, so she and her thugs are trying to stop the daughter. The guy and the daughter get together and experience mayhem on the run from two directions.
Jesse W. Haywood (Don Knotts) graduates from dental school in Philadelphia in 1870 and goes west to become a frontier dentist. Penelope "Bad Penny" Cushing (Barbara Rhoades) is offered a pardon if she will track down a ring of gun smugglers. She tricks Haywood into a sham marriage as a disguise. Haywood inadvertently becomes the legendary "Doc the Haywood" after he guns down "Arnold the Kid".
Roy Fleming is a small-town kiddie-ride operator who is deathly afraid of heights. After learning that his father has signed him up for the space program, Roy reluctantly heads for Houston, only to find out upon arriving that his job is as a janitor, not an astronaut. Anxious to live up to the expectations of his domineering father, Roy manages to keep up a facade of being an astronaut to his family and friends. When NASA decides to launch a layperson into space to prove the worthiness of a new automated spacecraft, Roy gets the chance to confront his fears.
Luther Heggs, a typesetter for the town newspaper, pitches an idea for a story about a local haunted house where a famous murder/suicide occurred 20 years earlier. After the editor assigns Luther to spend one night alone in the mansion, Heggs has a number of supernatural encounters and writes a front page story that makes him a hometown hero...until the nephew of the deceased sues him for libel.