(There are Spoilers) Not much ever happened in the town of Lunacy Alaska until its new head of the police, which consists of only one man deputy Otto Gruber, ex-Baltimore cop Nate Burns arrived.
Handsome and sure of himself Nate had no trouble at all scoring with the towns two hottest gals mother and daughter Charlene & Meg Galloway. In fact it was the hot and sexy, as well as twenty years younger, Meg who got to Nate heart first before her mom-Charlene-even started warming up in the bullpen. All this fooling around turned sour later in the movie when Meg and Charlene's estranged father and common law husband Pat Galloway was found, in a search for two missing local teenagers, frozen stiff with an ax stuck in his chest in a cave on the snow covered Mount No Name.
As it soon turned out Pat who was thought to have left Lunecy, as well as Charlene & Meg, some fifteen years ago in 1994 was in fact murdered by someone in town who, from all the evidence available, had in in for him. Nate soon starts to realize that the murdered Pat Galloway had been involved with the towns newspaper-The Lunatic-editor Max Hansbacker who he gave,just before he was murdered in November 1994, $3,000.00 to start up the paper.
Max who was anything but cooperative with Nate in finding out who murdered Pat is later found dead in his office with a bullet in his head and a suicide note admitting him being the person who murdered Pat. What we, in the audience, knew is that Max was totally innocent of Pat's murder because we saw, in shadow, Pat's actual killer blow Max's brains out!
Nate in trying to find out who murdered both Pat & Max ends up being resented by the townspeople, from lunacy's woman mayor A. Hopp on down, for him an outsider giving the locals a hard time in trying to do his job. The killer himself tries to get Nate killed by laying moose meat outside Meg's house, where Nate was having an affair with her,and enticing a giant brown bare to attack and kill him. In the end Nate who by then was fired from his job did solve Pat Galloway's murder and bring his killer to justice. That all took place after a wild shootout during a parade down Maine Street celebrating the 209th-back in 1805-anniversary of the towns founding.
Lukewarm, in the frozen north country, murder mystery that was about as stiff and the stiff, Pat Galloway, the movie was centered on. As for Nate's deep emotional problems, stemming from him being a cop in Baltimore, they didn't seem to effect his work at all until, bad news travels fast, they finally caught up with him. As it turned out all Nate had to do was pick up the phone and call home, back in Baltimore, and all would be forgiven.
