Schlappschuß

The Charlestown Chiefs is a hopeless losing hockey team in fifth place. The team has to do ridiculous events to make extra cash. Reggie Dunlop (Paul Newman) is a player/coach with a rag tag team with the latest being the goonish Hanson brothers. Their best player Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean) has a jealous wife (Lindsay Crouse) who hates the small town. With the town's mill closing, the team has to close at the end of the season. Reggie Dunlop decides to pump up the team and attendance by planting a story of the team moving to Florida and starts playing goon hockey.

This is an inappropriate movie and it's all the more funnier because of it. It is possibly the funniest hockey movie of all times. Director George Roy Hill rejoins Paul Newman after the success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting. It is more fun and more hilarious than either one. However you have to prepare for the language, the homophobia, and the goon hockey. It's certainly not a pretty movie.

I have played goal for 32 years.. On many of the men's rec teams I STILL hear someone say: "How about it tonight, guys? Old time hockey?" and everyone yells : "Pi** on old time hockey!!!" then "Eddie Shore???": "Pi** on Eddie Shore!!!" It still gets a laugh in the locker room!

The goalie being allergic to the fans is a quote from my favorite pro goaltender: the late Jacques Palante.. He was allergic, he said, to the Toronto Fans.. and would often sit the bench.

You can tell the actors are having fun making this movie.. it comes thru loud and clear!

Another locker room favorite that has survived is when you ask another player getting dressed what he is doing.. He might just answer: "Puttin' on the foil, want some???"

I've even been told on occasion that my wife is a lesbian as a joke! She ain't but I often react with mock anger and dash out of the net.

After a bad game where my defense let me down I told our coach in the locker room : " Trade me right fu***** now!!" (and the player to my right said "Now hang up")

A movie that survives this long after release is is is .... A CLASSIC!!

To be completely honest, "Slap Shot" would've charmed me simply for being a hockey movie. We could do with more of those, without Emilio Estevez. But it earns its place among the better (best?) sports movies not for having underdog skill, a committed dream or thirst for winning, but for dabbling in the gutters of blue humor and distilling the sport down to its most low-brow of beer-guzzling violent fun. The closest thing I can think of to compare this to is "Major League", which is a compliment unto itself.

Even if you don't like the sport, the movie is absolutely worth your time for an unusually profane (and always likable) Paul Newman and for the psychotic Hanson brothers.

Thoroughly entertaining.

8/10

Paul Newman is the coach of third rate failing minor league hockey team, The Charlestown Chiefs. The town is hit hard by unemployment and this appears to be the Chiefs' last season, however, if the coach can whip up the team up into a winning frenzy, then the unknown owner might just find a buyer and save all their carers? The management bring in three odd looking brothers who, once unleashed, take the whole team on a blood thirsty winning streak right to the championship final. The crowds flock in thirsting for more blood, but then the problems start to arise.

Slap Shot is a tremendously funny film, it's also incredibly violent and often vulgar in dialogue, but be sure to know that both things go hand in hand here (or should it be glove in glove?) to create one of the smartest sports pictures in the modern age. The hockey sequences are excellent (especially to a non fan like me), and the script bristles with course and biting humour. Slap Shot on its initial release was frowned upon by many critics, it was considered too profane and overly harsh with the win at all costs theme driving it forward. However, it's now rightly embraced as the smart and intelligent piece that director George Roy Hill wanted it to be seen as. A new generation of movie fans have started to seek it out and its reputation and fan base grows ever more larger by the year.

Newman was a bona fide star, his hair silver grey but his good looks still firmly intact, his performance has a grace about it that oddly sits nicely amongst this cynical stab at professional hockey; even if his characters' clothes are, in truth, icky. It would be a big disservice if I didn't mention the impact of the Hanson Brothers, surely one of the finest combinations to have ever graced a sports movie? They are at once unassumingly likable, the next gleefully violent, they are the glue that binds the whole picture together. Film is filled out with sparkling support work from the likes of Strother Martin, Michael Ontkean, Jennifer Warren, Lindsay Crouse and Jerry Houser.

Not long after originally writing this review, the legend that was Paul Newman sadly passed away, he left behind a movie legacy that few can touch, and trust me, this is one of them. A sports movie that never gets old and continues to pay off on repeat viewings. 8.5/10

I love how they got Paul Newman for this part, and how great he looks out on the ice. The film parodies the violence in hockey, and it had some potentially interesting bits in the class aspects of a blue collar town facing a plant closing, as well as a mostly faceless owner who disdains the sport and simply looks forward to a tax write-off, but unfortunately these don't come to much. Worse is the cringe-inducing homophobia. The best part of the film are the hilarious Hanson brothers, and the film could have used a lot more of them.