In the "Los Angeles Times", reviewer Michael Wilmington suggested that the film "... tries to pretend that it’s about tolerance: a kind of "Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner" about anti-L.A. freak bigotry." He also criticized the film's premise: ""Son-in-Law" suggests that somebody like Crawl would be as weird as a lunar being to the Midwestern Warners. That isn’t so. Because of TV and the movies, L.A. subcultures are the ones "everyone" knows about. ... In any town within reach of cable TV, the teen-agers would not only recognize a Pauly, there might be imitation Paulys at the high school."