Takes place in 1958, and involves a town, Clarksburg, California, The California Kid tells about a disturbed Sheriff Roy Childress (Vic Morrow), whose wife and daughter were killed by a speeder, turns bad, with a habit of deliberately punishing speeders by pushing their cars off the mountain highway in his 1957 Plymouth Belvedere. And a young man with a souped-up hotrod arrives to possibly end it.