In the "Detroit Free Press", Jack Mathews encapsulated: "How much space should a newspaper devote to a review of a film such as "Mother's Day", a repulsively graphic and vile story about a pair of retarded backwoods brothers who drag young women home to rape and bat around for the pleasure of their demented, sadistic mother? As little as possible." Tom Sullivan of "The Herald-News" panned the film, deeming it "just plain sick. And not especially entertaining, even at its better moments," while Ernest LeoGrande of the "New York Daily News" expressed a similar sentiment, giving the film a zero-star rating and writing: "The day homicidal rape becomes funny, "Mother's Day" may be considered a comedy. For the meantime, director Charles Kaufman has perverted his obvious sense of the ridiculous to pander to the audience for pornographic violence."