From the Archives of the Criminal Police

Four inseparable friends try to face their midlife crisis with daytrips and pranks at the expense of their families and the people around them.

El Cisco, who escaped a hanging with an exploding cigar, returns to the town of Calabasas five years later looking for the men who framed him.

During the last months of the Civil War, Joe's brother is killed unjustly by Clifford, a captain in the Northen army. Joe decides to join a group of Southerners determined to resist till the end. Joe is considered an outlaw and a reward is posted for his capture. When the war ends, Joe returns to the farm where he used to work only to find Christine, the owner's daughter and his sweetheart, engaged to the hated Captain Clifford.

Five short stories with contemporary settings. In New York, people are indifferent to derelicts sleeping on sidewalks, to a woman's assault in front of an apartment building, and to a couple injured in a car crash. A man, stripped of his identity, dies in bed with actors expressing his agony. A cheerful, innocent young man walking a city street in a time of war pays a price for this innocence. A couple talks about cinema while it watches another couple talk of love and truth on the eve of one character's return to Cuba. Striking students take over a university classroom; an argument follows about revolution or incremental change.

When a trio of free-spirited young women insists on spending the night in a castle rumored to be owned by the Devil himself, their cobweb-and-candelabra lark triggers a nightmare of lust, violence, vampirism, and Satanic seduction.