Son In Law

Son in Law (1993)

Runtime: 95 minutes

Directed by: Steve Rash

Starring: Pauly Shore, Carla Gugino, Lane Smith, Cindy Pickett, Mason Adams

From: Hollywood Pictures

Yep, this is something I watched as a kid. I hadn't seen it in many years. Netflix Instant fixed that problem last night. Thankfully it wasn't as bad as I feared. Peep all the details below... dude:

This is yet another one of those films in the category of “things I haven't watched in at least 20 years”; yeah, when I was a kid I did see this film, more than once. While my tastes are different now than they were back then, I can say that this is at least fine.

Pauly Shore is definitely best in small doses-if you even want to see anything by him-but this may be him at his most tolerable. Sure, he's a weirdo who speaks surfer lingo but for the most part his character is a nice guy. It's a standard fish out of water tale where we first see farmer's daughter Rebecca (the always lovely and talented Carla Gugino) leave her small South Dakota town to attend a Southern California university and there's a natural culture clash, until a guy known as Crawl (who else but Shore could play a character with such a name?) helps her out and gets her acclimated to her surroundings. For Thanksgiving he has nowhere to go so she takes him and general wackiness happens, and of course things go sour with the boyfriend she left behind in South Dakota.

While this is full of cliches and does not have a surplus of surprises, I have to say that it made me laugh often enough where I can give it a fair grade. There are also some basic lessons that are learned which are nice for the audience, as both parties learn from one another; it also shows that farming is not an easy job and those fine bucolic folk deserve a tip of my cap. It helps that you have fine actors in the film, from Gugino and Lane Smith to Mason Adams and Cindy Pickett. I was also pretty amused by Patrick Renna as the stereotypical “smartass little brother”. I was also amused thinking that in several ways, Smith as the patriarch of the family reminded me of my own dad; we didn't grow up on the farm but my parents were on the conservative side, would have been horrified too at the sites they saw in California and they definitely would not have liked Crawl either, at least at first.

It is pretty silly and goofy, admittedly. While nostalgia may be part of it, I do think that is is an acceptable watch and may not be as painful as some thing it would be given the star (who was a real product of his time during the height of his popularity) and the premise.