MisterWhiplash Fierce and unapologetic, helmed by a tough mother like George Roy Hill and scripted by a woman (yeah!), this is a hockey movie for those who love hockey and also those who have no idea what hockey is much about aside from the fights- and believe me there are lots and lots and lots of fights here. When it ended my wife (who has become a hockey fanatic over the past few years) commented on how it's a movie where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts: it's not a terribly quotable film, but you leave having gone through a full experience.Slap shot is grimy and sometimes very sleazy, and with the exception of Harry S Truman from Twin speaks, the Chiefs follow coach/player Paul Newmans lead: we got to get people seeing this team again and win some (bleep) games, so he goes for a sort of nihilistic approach: screw it! Get in fights! Rile up the refs! Get the audience involved! Then maybe the team won't be folded and shut down by the owner but rather sold to some Floridian.There even is an arc for Newmans character somewhere in the midst of what is a precursor to Animal House, a raucously anarchic studio comedy, only they're out of college and working class dudes who don't mind getting some teeth knocked out or getting a lip sewn up post (or dying) game-play. It's extremely slight though and if anything the players overall desire to get the hell out of their current state (i.e. they try to play 'old fashioned' hockey without uh violence and then when they hear from blustery p'd-off old Strother Martin there are NHL scouts in the stands, that's all that registers from the managers motivational speech so BACK TO THE CREAMING THOSE BASTARDS!) makes it that much funnier.There are stretches here where the laughs aren't plenty - it's much a 70s movie that way - but much of this is so hysterically spot on because it is all about behavior. Sure, the players on their bus (plus some local girls following on another bus) mooning some angry rival team onlookers is one thing, and that can be funny. But Hill is smart as a director to let so much of it be about the personalities of these players - those three brother goons who play with their electric train set and seem more like one entity with three heads and pairs of glasses are a prime example - and also how Newman does a lot with just a look or a reaction, how he interacts with his friends girlfriend as she drives at top speeds in her van, how he is both 'don't give a f***' but giving a f*** at the same time for what counts.Did I mention how wonderful Newman is here? Kind of? I must say again that he is the heart and soul of this movie, a true star who continues (maybe at this point caps off) a career of anti establishment I-do-things-my-way forces of nature like the Hustler and Cool Hand Luke. He can be brash and crude as this guy, but damn is he charming and clever and a character only a complete stiff upper lipped being couldn't get behind.Slap Shot is a great comedy for the reason that we as the audience see all the truth that is there, in this case the dirty, foul mother and scabrous lives of (semi) professional hockey players, and that they are not in on the joke of themselves. And if my wife was somewhat correct that on a first viewing its not the most quotable thing ever, there's a constant energy to nearly every scene where the comedy is big and bold and brutal and unapologetic. I love that kind of comedy, and in a blue collar 70s milieu that is deep down, at the end of it all, political too (working class vs the rich, a town closing a plant so jobs gone, how will they go to hockey games, etc).

Mr-Fusion 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

gangstahippie Hockey is my favourite sport to watch, pretty much the only sport i really watch and am into. I love reading and watching movies about it.Slap Shot is the classic hockey comedy. Directed by George Roy Hill and starring Paul Newman, the film follows a minor league hockey team known as the Charlestown Chiefs who after hearing they will be folded by the end of the season decide to play more violently/dirty in order to attract more popularity.The film has some very funny moments, great performances and is a must-watch if you're a fan of ice hockey or even a fan of sports films in general.This film, Goon and Puck Hogs are the only R-rated comedies about ice hockey I can think of.The sequel to this film is nowhere near as good and I haven't even bothered watching the third film as its Rated PG and seems to be more like mighty ducks, even though I do love the Hanson Brothers.9/10

tieman64 "Gay men are guardians of the masculine impulse. What is anonymous sex in a dark alleyway but a homage to male freedom?" ― Camille PagliaRelease "Slap Shot" in any other decade and it would feel like a vulgar comedy cynically put together by a marketing committee. Release in the 1970s, though, and it'll feels like some kind of social statement. With F bombs.Directed by George Roy Hill, "Slap Shot" stars Paul Newman as Reggie Dunlop, an ageing hockey coach based in the steel town of Charlestown. With the closing of local steel mills, money has become scarce. To make matters worse, the owners of the Charlestown Chiefs, Reggie's team, are thinking of liquidating the club. Reggie's plan, to keep his team and his boys marketable, is to resort to violent sensationalism. He re-brands the Chiefs into a band of barbarians on ice. The public love it.Despite being set in the macho world of sports, "Slap Shot" was written by a woman, Nancy Dowd. She has the film develop two parallel strands. One focuses on various women who find men to be emasculated, boorish and immature. These women, most of whom reject traditional femininity and are perpetually dressed in dour clothes, are unfulfilled by men and even go so far as to turn to lesbian relationships. The men put up with this. The times are changing, they rationalise.The other half of the film deals with the arena of sport being appropriated and perverted by Big Business. Whores in skates, our band of foul-mouthed performers cater to the baser impulses of spectators. Always playing with toys, and childishly homophobic, they're also incapable of mature relationships with women. There's an infantalizing and emasculating quality to both sport and business, Dowd argues, our heroes essentially castrated and so feminized, regardless of their foul mouthed, macho tirades. Dowd's women, meanwhile, are masculinized, made courser, more cynical and harder by the market. Indeed, it is Reggie who insists upon turning women "back into women", taking them to beauty parlours in an attempt to restore old modes of masculinity and femininity.Reggie is further shocked when he confronts the fact that the Charlestown Chiefs are owned by a svelte businesswoman, a woman who has so little regard for the bloodsport that hockey has become, that she refuses to let her own children watch games. Reggie fumes. He's deemed a pathetic product by the very people who profit from his antics.The film ends with a Princeton educated player, Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), staging a little protest. Throughout the film, Braden refuses to sell-out for the sake of the box office; he refuses to fight. During the film's climactic game, Braden then goes further and stages a strip-routine. "Make him stop! That's disgusting," rivals yell. The act not only makes a mockery of boardroom and bleacher violence, but the machismo of audiences, owners and players, all of whom deem violence less obscene than innocence and nudity. Ironically, Braden's wife, for the first time in the film, is here given feminine clothes, and it is an act of violence committed by the oppositional team which swiftly leads to the now-pacifist Chiefs winning their final game.The 1970s saw a number of gritty, foul-mouthed sports movies ("The Longest Yard", "Bad News Bears" etc). "Slap Shot" was one of the last in this wave. Interestingly, Hill has the film end with a husband and wife splitting. She's a successful businesswoman who skips town, he's left alone in the rubble of Charlestown. The film's signature song is Maxine Nightingale's "Right Back Where We Started From", the song's lyrics ("it's alright, and it's coming along, we got to get right back to where we started from") perhaps speaking, amongst other things, to a masculinity which dreams of one day reasserting itself.7.9/10 – See "Bull Durham". Worth two viewings.