Luke Perry saddles up as frontier circuit judge John Goodnight in the first of three films starring Perry as a Roy Bean type judge. Unlike the fictional Bean, Perry's a real lawyer and not a judge because he's got deputies to back up his ruling. What he does have is a passion for justice and will go the extra mile for it.
The film segments into three stories, the first is a prologue showing Perry's character as a youth played by Sam Duke seeing his family massacred in an outlaw raid.
We next see Perry's character unable to dispense justice to a young black kid whose father was hung by nightriders wearing bedsheets like the Ku Klux Klan. Perry does some extralegal work there however.
Finally Perry returns to the town where his folks were killed and takes on a gang that rides for the owner of the local Ponderosa who is going out of his way to persecute Cheyenne Indians. Again the object is justice and Perry has a way of brushing aside troublesome technicalities.
I like Perry's character and hope he does more John Goodnight films in the future.
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