This goofy movie has a special place in my heart for several reasons. In the past, it was a Silder tradition to watch it on New Year’s Day while nursing a hangover from the previous night and eating Paul’s infamous chili. Currently, I now watch it every Fall to get fired up over the new NHL season, along with Miracle. Slap Shot is also ingrained in all hockey fans. Various lines from it is their secret language like teenagers have with their flavor-of-the-month comedy. Austin is a bit behind the curve but we have numerous transplants who say “Two minutes by yourself, and you feel shame!” when the opposing players are sent to the penalty box.
Slap Shot debuted thirty years ago and it still holds up. There are dated elements but the core story succeeds because the execution is what separates it from cheesier sports flicks such as Major League. When it opens, the Charleston Chiefs are a mediocre, minor-league hockey team based in a dying industrial town during the late Seventies. Attendance is poor, the town’s primary employer is shutting down and many of the players don’t have serious futures in the NHL, WHA or Europe because they’re too old or not talented enough. Reggie (Newman) fears the team may be folding with all this bad news on top of the general manager’s evasiveness regarding money. So he starts a rumor about the Chiefs being sold to a buyer in Florida to keep the players’ morale up. Then on the ice, Reggie makes the team “goon it up” to draw attention. The newly acquired Hanson brothers have no problem picking fights, same goes for the naive Dave (Houser). Oddly, the strategy of turning their games into a blood-sport-circus works. The Chiefs start winning, their home stadium fills up, fans follow them on road games and the opposition fears, hates or dreads them. Except for Ned (Ontkean), he refuses to fight since he sees through Reggie’s ploys. Unfortunately, Ned is having problems with his wife Lily (Braden) which gives Reggie a different way to antagonize the team’s best scorer. I’ll end the plot synopsis there. The movie’s last 30 minutes are some of its finest moments entailing the Chiefs reaching the championship and Reggie finally meeting the team’s real owner.
Earlier I stated this film was dated. Through the hair, the clothing, the technology, the music (“Right Back Where We Started From” by Maxine Nightingale permeates travel sequences) and the style of hockey scream “Seventies!” But it has aged pretty damn well after 30 years because it retains the bulk of its best scenes when network TV cuts the nudity and dubs over the cruder language; this is how I first saw it on ABC as a kid in the early Eighties. Maybe it wouldn’t air today since its primary humor is physical, namely the Hansons hitting people and their assault on a fan that pre-dates Terry O’Reilly’s Madison Square Garden brawl by two years. Comedy Central wouldn’t object, it’s tame compared to South Park. It also has a place in my heart as being one of the better films as a window into the past. When it was made, Slap Shot was a contemporary movie so all those dated details were genuine which “retro” movies tend to go overboard on (the easiest example being The Wedding Singer). Finally, it has a solid, Sixties-Seventies bittersweet ending Hollywood rarely gives movies now. It ends on an up note yet the future for Reggie, the Hansons, Dave, Ned and Lily is uncertain. I prefer to be left wondering instead of having the postscript telegraphed, this completely ruined Unbreakable.
Someone in the hockey press once wondered why this sport doesn’t have as many movies as football or baseball while Slap Shot was mentioned as the penultimate hockey flick. It captures the game’s essence on and off the ice in addition to being funny. Personally, if those other sports had a movie half as clever as Slap Shot, then the world would’ve been spared the Major League trilogy and Friday Night Lights every week.