Featured Review: HOUSE BUNNY

The House Bunny

Starring- Anna Faris, Emma Stone, Kat Dennings, Katherine McPhee, Rumer Willis, Colin Hanks, Christopher McDonald, Beverly D'Angelo

Directed by Fred Wolf

Grade: D

"I gotta meet this frickin' bird!"

If while watching The House Bunny, you start to feel deja vu, you're not alone. Written by the co-writers of Legally Blonde, this film plays like a tired mixture of 50% Blonde, 30% Revenge Of The Nerds, and 20% Sydney White. Lots of ditsy blondes, lots of pink, lots of stereotypes about college make the film so vapid that it refuses to listen to the genial goodwill message it tacks on at the end.

While Anna Faris is no Reese Witherspoon in the acting pantheon, she deviates away from Witherspoon's Elle Woods enough to find a character on her own. Faris at times is really annoying, playing up the Marilyn Monroe-voiced, clueless but means well bimbo, but her comic timing and natural likability is one of the few saving graces for a pretty cliche and tumescent film.

The House Bunny has an undeniable mark left by Happy Madison, the Adam Sandler-owned production company in charge of it. It is at times just as raunchy as some of Sandler and his crew's dirtiest films, and if there is anything positive to say about the movie besides Faris' comic timing, it would be the equal way that the girls can perform gross-out gags alongside the boys. But then, is that really a good thing when it results in The House Bunny?

Shelley (Faris) is a former orphan, now a staple in Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion. But unbeknown to her, some of her fellow Playmates want her gone. Therefore, a day after turning 27, she is forced to move out. Where can an unschooled, unintelligent, poor, former Playboy bunny go to? Naturally, after a night in jail, she finds a sorority house further down the block. This leads Shelley to an unlikely facade as House Mother to the worst and most ragtag house on campus. These girls need pledges to keep their chapter, but who wants to pledge at a place that doesn't feature rockin' parties and kickass social events?. Shelley has ideas.

Pretty much every cliche about college and female outcasts are presented here. The girls range from being nerds to feminist rebels to pregnant hippies to exceedingly tomboyish. They are purposely and exagerratedly ugly, their house is ugly, and naturally, in the case of Emma Stone and Katherine McPhee, and mostly, in the case of Kat Dennings and Rumer Willis (eerily similar looking to father Bruce) become beautiful with a quick She's All That montage makeover that exceeds no cost.

The movie throws in a quick feel-good ending about the dangers of over-hyping the value of looks, but after spending the bulk center of the film glorifying the girls' new wealth in popularity and outer gravitas, the final moments feels as contrite and hollow as the jokes that reside in those moments.

The humor here is a bit overlapping at times. There's a dearth of dumb blonde jokes as expected, but once in awhile the screenwriters slip in a genuinely witty little tidbit that almost goes unnoticed. Instead the movie focuses on the dimwit musings that a 'typical blonde' from Playboy like Shelley might conceive in her head.

Anna Faris has come a long way from being the slightly-built, raven-haired Cindy Campbell of the Scary Movie franchise. One could say that when Reese Witherspoon left the vapid blonde role for bigger and artsier pictures like Walk The Line and, uh, Just Like Heaven, Faris ably filled in on her own terms. But how many films do we need, in which a ditsy woman learns how to deal with her life and the people that surround her in cutesy fashion and fabulous, FABULOUS clothes?

Overall, The House Bunny feels like just another comedy that curbs its ideas from the wacky hi-jinks movies from the 1980s, without as much family-friendly camp. Perhaps in 25 years our generation and the next will look at movies like The House Bunny with the same kind of cult reverence that we do for Revenge Of The Nerds; never as a particularly good film, but enjoying the somewhat dated 'product of the times' and humor with genial affection. Shelley may have hoped to be a Playboy Centerfold, but that's the best The House Bunny can hope for.