The original Slap Shot, a bawdy 1977 comedy starring Paul Newman, is considered the best hockey movie ever made so you can imagine fans' outcry when a direct-to-video sequel (starring Stephen Baldwin, no less!) appeared in 2001. For a low-budget follow-up it wasn't overly terrible and kept some of the off-colour humour of its predecessor. Now here we are, seven years later, and Slap Shot: The Junior League has arrived and, in its wake, took a series that started out as an adults only R-rated romp and turned it into something more akin to Disney's The Mighty Ducks series.

Our opening narration, by Leslie Nielsen who briefly flutters through the movie as the mayor, reacquaints us with the town of Charleston where things have gone even more downhill than the hardship of the first film as evil real estate agent Bernie Fraser (Lynda Boyd) has decided to try and buy out a good chunk of the town to develop a fancy golf course on it. In fact, the only real glory Charleston has seen in the past thirty years was when their beloved Chiefs, led by the rowdy Hanson brothers, went down in hockey history.

There's only really two things standing in Bernie's way to accomplishing her goal, one of them being the owner of the local hockey rink and the rundown looking Newman House for Boys on the outskirts of town. We meet Riley (Greyston Holt), who has basically been running things at the home, and his group of fellow orphans (and what a clichéd bunch they are!) who come up with the idea to challenge Bernie's junior league hockey club to a game where they'll keep the house if they happen to win.

Of course, our scheming Bernie things it's going to be easy as pie little knowing Riley and his crew have recruited the mentoring of the infamous (and now Zen loving) Hanson's which leads to the expected scenes of our rag-tag group of underdogs training, playing poorly in lead-up games and getting into fights, and a finale that's your typical "big game" with a 'rah-rah' message about playing fair and all that eye-rolling jive. Like I said, this is definitely a Hell of a lot more kid friendly than the first two and it blows my mind they've gone from the rampant sexist and homosexual jokes of the original to something that feels like a made-for-TV movie and has cameos by ex-NHL superstars Doug Gilmour and Mark Messier who pop-on screen to blabber on about sportsman-like conduct (and the expected jab at Messier about Lay's potato chips - since he appeared in commercials for them numerous times).

By now, Jeff Carlson, Steve Carlson, and Dave Hanson have beaten their characterizations as the horn-rimmed glasses wearing Hanson thugs into the ground. They really have no purpose here other than having something recognizable from the other films. Without them this could pass as just your regular, mediocre, family sports comedy. Thankfully, Holt and the rest of the younger cast do fairly well in forgettable roles and Boyd does make an okay villain even if she's not on the bitch level of Margaret Whitton in 1989's Major League.

Slap Shot: The Junior League sticks to formula and is pretty harmless but there's nothing here for fans of the previous entries. It's a DTV sequel that nobody really asked for, and one that probably shouldn't have been made. (Chris Hartley, 10/26/09)

Directed By: Richard Martin.
Written By: Brad Riddell.

Starring: Greyston Holt, Jeff Carlson, Steve Carlson, Dave Hanson.