The inspiration, as the title tells, was Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror). Cavallone followed only loosely the poem, interpolating some of its most outrageous content within the story of a film director, Paolo (Gianni Garko) who’s undergoing a deep personal crisis. The first part (which producer Giuseppe Tortorella labelled "mythological porn") is set in Italy, as Marco is working on a film called Maldoror, and focuses on his tormented relationship with a married woman, Monica (Jane Avril). According to the script, it was filled with excessive and cruel images, extracts from the film-within-a-film which were liberally spliced within the plot, and in their uneasiness somehow predated Pasolini’s Salò.

A small town in Italy is about to celebrate their patron saint. The city is full of people with different problems. A Communist in existentialist crisis that also must take care of his mentally ill wife. A woman who is tired of her husband's inability to show emotions and therefore more and more often slips into the world of dreams. A perverse butcher engaged in sex with the meat he sells when he's not peeping on young girls. A girl who became pregnant after having sex with her father. In this town a mysterious stranger show up and who turns on several of the inhabitants lives.

A newsman works with a blind puzzle-solver to uncover a deadly conspiracy linked to a genetic research facility.