A young, rebellious Ute Indian joins the rodeo circuit and falls in with a drunken mentor who teaches him the ways of the ring and the world.

Two bawdy, tough looking navy lifers - "Bad-Ass" Buddusky, and "Mule" Mulhall - are commissioned to escort a young pilferer named Meadows to the brig in Portsmouth. Meadows is not much of a thief. Indeed, in his late teens, he is not much of a man at all. His great crime was to try to steal forty dollars from the admiral's wife's pet charity. For this, he's been sentenced to eight years behind bars. At first, Buddusky and Mulhall view the journey as a paid vacation, but their holiday spirits are quickly depressed by the prisoner, who looks prepared to break into tears at any moment. And he has the lowest self-image imaginable. Buddusky gets it into his head to give Meadows a good time and teach him a bit about getting on in the world. Lesson one: Don't take every card life deals you. Next, he teaches Meadows to drink, and, as a coup de grace, finds a nice young whore to instruct him in lovemaking. Mule, who worries aloud about his own position with military authority, seems pleased ...

When her husband John has a heart attack while out in a rowboat on the lake, Louise Haloran throws his body overboard and later tells the family that he has left on an urgent business trip. Her main concern is that she can only inherit a part of the family fortune if if her husband is alive. The Halorans are a strange family, still grieving over the death of the youngest daughter Kathleen who drowned in a pond when she was just a child. They hold an annual ceremony of remembrance every year on the anniversary of her death. This year however, someone is wielding an ax intent on murder.

Paul Groves (Peter Fonda), a television commercial director, is in the midst of a personality crisis...

Francis Barnard goes to Spain, when he hears his sister Elizabeth has died. Her husband Nicholas Medina, the son of the brutest torturer of the Spanish Inquisition, tells him she has died of a blood disease, but Francis finds this hard to believe. After some investigating he finds out that it was extreme fear that was fatal to his sister and that she may have been buried alive! Strange things then start to happen in the Medina castle.