The House Bunny

Snow White, 2008 style. Shelley (Anna Faris) may be pure as the driven slush but she’s got the proverbial heart of gold, and her ignorance more than counterbalances her lack of innocence. She’s spent the entirety of her adult life hanging with Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion (I’m indebted to the imdb for the information that technically this makes her a Playmate, not a bunny, but you know what, “The House Mate” doesn’t work so well as a title).

Anywise, reaching the grand old age of 27, poor Shelley is shown the door at the Mansion, and asked to go through it. (Mr Hefner, who plays himself as a kind of benevolent grandfatherly playboy is conveniently absolved of blame by the script – though he looks so creepy you wouldn’t leave your grandkids within a two mile radius.)

Shelley is jailed after misunderstanding a policeman’s instruction to “blow in this” (uh huh) but perks up almost immediately when she stumbles into a vacancy as house mother to a sorority of campus pariahs (sure she does). The Zeta house is in danger of losing its charter unless the seven members can drum up some new pledges soon. Translation: the students will be turfed out and forced to find alternative accommodation unless they find fresh meat for their club. Luckily Shelley has some ideas about that…

re have been lots of good dumb blonde comedies: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and The Seven Year Itch with Marilyn Monroe; Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday; Alicia Silverstone in Clueless; Goldie Hawn in almost anything. Anna Farris nailed the type to perfection in her cameo role in Lost In Translation, and the screenwriters of The House Bunny Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith previously mined this vein of humour rather more effectively in Legally Blonde.

The trick is to be oblivious, not obvious, and Faris is smart enough to carry it off. Shelley is the sort of girl who thinks “vapid” is a compliment, but she’s such a gifted makeover artist she probably deserves her own reality TV show. The Zetas dress dowdy, don’t wear make up and have zero contact with the opposite sex (although mysteriously one of them is pregnant). Shelley takes them shopping and hey presto! she releases their inner hotness. Not that it’s going to be that hard when you’ve got Emma Stone (Superbad), Kat Dennings (Charlie Bartlett) and Rumer Willis to work with.

Rather less screen time is dedicated to the reverse process, by which the girls try to educate Shelley so she can dazzle nice Colin Hanks with her erudition, but at least somebody thought it was worth the effort.

But is it funny? Not really – or not nearly often enough. First time director Fred Wolf is yet another graduate from Saturday Night Live, where he was a writer (Adam Sandler is the producer) and frankly he couldn’t sell a gag to a kidnapper. Aside from Faris, it’s good to see Beverly D’Angelo – she used to do a good line in smart blondes back in the day – and Emma Stone does a pretty good job with an unpromising part (a geeky girl almost as dumb as Shelley) but it’s too silly for anyone to make much of an impression.

In the end the moral is clear: be personable, be sexy and be as smart as you can be… That way you will be popular and get a boyfriend, which is all anyone can ask for, right?

Now what’s that word again… Oh yes, I remember: Vapid.

Tom Charity

tom.charity@lovefilm.com