Movie Review: The House Bunny
The House Bunny (2008)–**1/2
The House Bunny is flavored lip gloss. At first read, that might be considered a bad thing. But this light-hearted comedy starring Scary Movie comedienne Anna Faris is wrapped in a sweet, colorful coating of joy. It’s hard not to smile, even when you’re cringing.
In the cut throat world of Playboy Bunnies, Shelly (Faris) is on her way out. She’s spent all of her adult life in the Playboy Mansion, but one letter, apparently from Hugh Hefner, tells Shelly that she needs to pack her bags. When she asks why Hef would let her go, one of the house boys tells the 27-year-old that she is too old. She’s “59 in bunny years.”
Without a job or a home, Shelly hits the streets, stumbling upon a lesser Playboy Mansion: A sorority house.
The first house she enters isn’t as receptive to the bare-tummied Shelly joining their ranks, but the Zeta house, full of its misfits and loners, needs a house mother who can teach the girls to be sexy. (Show some skin. Be flirtatious. Suppress those smarts.) Sexy means boys. Boys mean pledges. Pledges mean that they won’t get kicked off campus for not meeting the Panhellenic council’s pledge quota. They may not know it, but the Zetas really are all that. Sometimes it just takes a Bunny to bring it out.
Like any film that overtly advances the notion that all you need is makeup and a push-up bra to win the day, The House Bunny also tells us that we should be ourselves. Thankfully, The House Bunny never tries to jam the idea down our throats. Instead Faris’ talents as a comedic wonder are brought to the forefront.
Faris may be the only actress in the world who can wear, well, what you’d expect a Playboy bunny to wear and still have an audience focus on punchlines. Her full-bodied zaniness makes a rather formulaic movie feel slightly fresher and sunnier than it should be. Obstacles are put in the way, and adversity is overcome. But what could have been Legally Blonde-lite, turns into a farce with unexpected appeal.
Faris isn’t the only one who saves the film, though. Director Fred Wolf and his filmmaking team take a movie that was packaged for consumption—including a Hugh Hefner cameo, a role and musical number for American Idol Katherine McPhee, a romantic lead played by Colin Hanks, and other, less interesting romances—and chops it down to size. For as funny as Faris is, this is the crew that recognized her as the comedy star she could be beyond the Scary Movie franchise. Watching The House Bunny, you wonder why it took this long.
The House Bunny, starring Anna Faris, Colin Hanks, Kat Dennings, Emma Stone, Katherine McPhee, Rumer Willis, Beverly D’Angelo and Christopher McDonald, directed by Peter Wolf, is in theaters now.
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