‘The House Bunny’ | 2 stars
Perhaps one day Anna Faris will appear in a movie as funny as she is.
Until then we have “The House Bunny,” a not-unlikable bundle of clichés that might be described as “Revenge of the Nerds” with cleavage.
Faris plays Shelley, a Playboy bunny who dreams of becoming a centerfold.
“It says, ‘I’m naked in the middle of a magazine. Unfold me.’ ”
So far, though, Shelley has appeared in only a couple of pictorials, like “The Girls of Charlie Sheen.”
Then on her 27th birthday Shelley is thrown out of the Playboy Mansion (27, she’s told, is 59 in bunny years). Having spent her entire adulthood there, she’s totally unprepared for the real world.
Wandering onto a college campus, our girl discovers that there are sororities and that sororities have house mothers. So she’s hired by the Zetas, the worst sorority on campus, populated by an odd assortment of bookish female geeks (played by the likes of “Superbad’s” Emma Stone, ex-“Idol” finalist Katharine McPhee, Kat Dennings and Bruce Willis’ daughter Rumer).
Outcasts on campus, the sad-sack Zetas are mercilessly tormented by the cool sororities and about to lose their charter unless they can assemble a pledge class of 30 girls in just a few days.
Shelley instantly recognizes her mission, which involves turning them into carefully coiffed, breast-enhanced versions of herself. She takes them shopping for sexy clothes, outfits them with wigs and push-up bras and holds seminars on makeup (“Remember, girls, the eyes are the nipples of the face”).
And along the way Shelley meets a decent guy (Colin Hanks) who operates an old-folks home.
Screenwriters Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith are basically stealing from their own “Legally Blonde” but to far less effect. Once in a while they come up with a genuinely funny moment (like a parody of Marilyn Monroe’s subway grate skirt flip from “The Seven Year Itch” or the homeless Shelley’s encounter with a cop).
Mostly, though, “The House Bunny” (directed by Fred Wolf of “Strange Wilderness” notoriety) is too soft and squishy to have any real bite.
Still, it has Faris, who plays dumb like nobody’s business.
So far her talents have been showcased mostly in the “Scary Movie” franchise, though she did have small “straight” parts in “Brokeback Mountain” and “Lost in Translation.”
A pretty woman willing to make a complete idiot of herself gets high marks from this critic, and Faris has the potential to be this generation’s Lucille Ball. She has great comic timing and seems absolutely fearless in her willingness to chase after a laugh.
She’s ambitious, too — she came up with the idea for “House Bunny” and was one of the producers — but she needs to find a smart movie that can accommodate her comedic talents.
One of these days.
‘HOUSE BUNNY’ ★★
Director: Fred Wolf
Cast: Anna Faris, Colin Hanks, Emma Stone, Kat Dennings, Hugh M. Hefner
Rated: PG-13 for sex-related humor, partial nudity and brief strong language
Running time: 1:37
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RABBIT ANSWERS
1. “Bambi” (with Thumper the bunny, 1942)
2. “Harvey” (1950)
3. “Alice in Wonderland” (with the White Rabbit, 1951)
4. “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (1975)
5. “Fatal Attraction” (with the victimized pet, 1987)
6. “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (1988)
7. “Roger & Me” (featuring Flint, Mich., rabbit breeder Rhonda Britton, 1989)
8. “Donnie Darko” (with the hallucination in a rabbit suit, 2001)
9. “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” (2005)
10. “The Last Mimzy” (2007)
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