‘The House Bunny’ — Dumb but Fun Bunny

The misfits of Zeta Alpha Zeta, of course, are no mere misfits, but extreme eccentrics. From the girl so shy she texts her roommates from inside a closet to the de facto leader modeled after the prototypical nerd, the girls’ characters are cartoons just waiting for a skimpily dressed Anna Faris to come to the rescue. And come to the rescue Faris does, as nefarious scheming sees the titular house bunny, Shelley, kicked out of the heavenly Playboy mansion, and chance sees her in the unlikely role of house mother to a bottom-of-the-barrel sorority. That ink stain on the hand is more than deja-vu; it’s the mark of carbon-copying. There are some traces of “Legally Blonde,” which comes as no surprise since “The House Bunny” was written by the same screenwriters, Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, but the sweetness and heart that made “Legally Blonde” a genuine upending of Carl Jung’s forgotten archetype, the dumb-but-golden-hearted blonde, is non-existent in this vapid comedy. There could have been a subversive – relative to mainstream Puritanical attitudes towards sex — quality to the idea of a woman of a woman posing nude for Playboy as a means of self-empowerment, but the film ultimately indulges shallow clichés.

Yet, someone help me, “The House Bunny” does succeed at what it sets out to do: get laughs. The movie is funny, often hilarious, ranging from the purely silly and the slapstick to the hide-your-head-behind-a-pillow-because-you-can’t-believe-the-character-just-did-that. There’s enough to make the gags work without devolving the film into a spoof, and Hugh Hefner, playing himself, may be stunt casting, but he gets some of the film’s funniest scenes.