FREE: SLAP SHOT Hockey Movie Ultraviolet Digital Code

Hill was a natural fit to direct a film about the testosterone-saturated antics of a minor league hockey team on a losing streak, but one of Slap Shot's ironies is that the script was penned by a woman, Nancy Dowd, whose brother, Ned, played for the Johnstown Jets, the model for the film's Charlestown Chiefs. Dowd built the script from her brother's life and experiences and those of his teammates and friends, which gives even the most absurd moments in Slap Shot a grounding in reality. With Ned Dowd as a technical advisor (he also appeared in the small but memorable role of Ogie Oglethorpe) and many more real hockey players recruited for both the Chiefs and their opponents, including the so-called "Hanson Brothers (of which more below), Hill was able to capture authentic scenes of rinkside mayhem that no film has ever surpassed. The audiences of 1977 were shocked by the violence and also, in that pre-Tarantino era, by the locker-room language. Newman himself claimed that his vocabulary changed after Slap Shot, as if his foul-mouthed character had lodged somewhere permanently in his brain.

Slap Shot chronicles a season in the rambunctious career of the Charlestown Chiefs hockey team, who play in the fictional Federal League. Under Coach Reg Dunlop (Newman), the team has been losing for years, and this season looks to be no different. The manager, Joe McGrath (Strother Martin), is cutting costs wherever he can, lining up promotional events like fashion shows (which the players find humiliating) and generally behaving like the captain of a sinking ship. Dunlop suspects that the team's owner, whose identity he doesn't know, is preparing to shutter the clubhouse.