**SPOILERS** You usual control freak with a badge movie has handsome but mentally unstable Sheriff Dave Ward, Harry Hamlin,running the small, on the Canadian, border town of Redwood like it's his own little fiefdom where his word is the only law in town. Sheriff Ward is also big with the ladies in town even though were constantly told that he's happily married with his wife being about as visible, or invisible, as that of TV L.A Detective Let. Francis Columbo who's only heard of but never seen by anyone in the audience or cast.
It's when perky and pretty single mom Annie Walter, Michele Greene, shows up at the local police station for a job interview that Sheriff Ward starts to overplay his hand. That in the end leads to Ward's ultimate downfall as the top dog in Redwood by becoming just another jailbird in a Federal pen facing a long stretch behind bars.
Annie transferring from the Cincinnati PD is a bit more sophisticated, then the members of the Redwood Police Department, with the law and how it should be both followed and applied. She soon realizes that the handsome Sheriff Ward is not only a sexual harasser, which is the least of his many imperfections, but also an illegal drug and contraband dealer. The Sheriff also likes to work over helpless prisoners in getting them to confess to crimes that they didn't commit.
It's when Sheriff Ward starts to put the screws on Annie, in trying to get her to go to bed with him, that she goes over his head with a sexual harassment suit that she files against him. It was a hard thing for Annie to do since she's stuck in Redwood with her young daughter Sarha, Elysa Hogg,and a $180,000 mortgage form a cabin that the manipulative Sheriff Ward got for her.
Sheriff Ward not only leans on Annie but his private secretary Patty Renault, Linda Doucett, which has the two women file federal sexual harassment charges against him. Sheriff Ward is now also very desperate to keep the lid on his illegal, which the sexual harassment suit can expose, activities in town which can very well, and do, bring the weight of the Federal Government, or the FBI, on top of him.
You know right away as soon as you see him that Sheriff Ward is a bit off center with him always wearing heavily bleached dungarees instead of the police issued pants that all the police in his department wear. Maybe this was his way of being either sexy, to the the women in town, or just pain different. There's also the strange relationship that the Sheriff has with Redwood's local child abuser, and later rapist, Fred Brandon, Don Thompson. Thompson is always getting drunk and beating the living hell of his pre-teenage daughter Kristi, Amber Warrent, with Sheriff Ward, after busting Thompson's face up, letting him go free and on to later continue his beating Kristi?
It's later found out that Thompson is involved with the Sheriff's illegal drug and contraband smuggling activities which is why he's always covering up for him. Later when Sheriff Ward catches Thompson stealing some of his sh*t he has no trouble smashing his skull in with his flashlight killing him. This mindless act on Sheriff Ward's part brought the FBI, who were watching him for months, into the mix and had Annie stick her neck out, with an undercover wire, to finally catch the bum.
Actually Sheriff Ward's sexual harassment of both Annie and Patty, who later dropped all the charges against him, would never have gotten anywhere with him being an upstanding citizen and happily married, with his wife never being seen at all in the film, man. It was his illegal drug pushing or dealing, as well as arrogance, not his inflamed and overactive libido that in the end did Sheriff Ward in where he ended up being the one getting screwed instead of his female victims.
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