Main Feature
I must admit that when I first heard of this film the thought which crossed my mind came in two parts: “This looks like one of the worst films ever,” and, “although, Anna Faris is hot”. The House Bunny is very much cast from the same mold as Clueless and, more recently, Mean Girls. Shelly (Anna Faris) is a Playboy bunny who finds herself thrown out of the Playboy mansion and rather bizarrely takes refuge in the role of ‘house mother’ to a bunch of socially inept sorority sisters.
The formula is one enormous cliché with a group of impressionable young girls who, in an attempt to fit in with everyone else, fall to the dark side and become an imitation of the very people they detest for making their lives such a misery. This is coupled with another clichéd attempt at fitting in when the not so bright model feigns a superior intellect in order to try and impress the boy she likes. Misguided opinions on the Internet never cease to amaze me. It seems many have labeled this film as being ‘anti-feminist’ and if by that they mean The House Bunny doesn’t take itself too seriously then I couldn’t agree more and I welcome that fact.
Anna Faris is surprisingly good in her role as the slow-witted but innocent Shelly and I am glad she didn’t go over the top in some over-exaggerated performance; a caricature would have ruined the film. Colin Hanks (son of Tom) shares his father’s expressionless, or dare I say, wooden, acting “style” and compared to his starring role in Orange County he really doesn’t have much to do in this film other than play Shelly’s rather dull love interest. To go into any kind of detail on the supporting cast in The House Bunny is not an easy task because while it involves multiple characters this really is The Anna Faris Show. What I can say is that the gorgeous Katherine McPhee, making her film debut, did a good job as the heavily pregnant Harmony and it was amusing to think “That girl has a good voice” during the karaoke scene and later discover that she was runner-up on American Idol.
Extras
I wish I could say that the Extras here are a mixture of good and bad but they are actually just varying degrees of bad. There really isn’t much to offer and what there is just seems like needless padding to me. The deleted scenes offer nothing interesting and the ‘behind the scenes’ featurettes amount to a collection of silly dances and face pulling for the camera and some comments from the Playboy bunnies who make cameos in the film. Based on their appearance in videos it is remarkable how incredibly dumb the real-life bunny girls appear to be. One of the girls comment on the fact that the “character” she plays is so much like her because at one point in the film she suggests watching Scarface and that is the type of thing she would do in real life. Incredible. The Extras are so wafer thin on this disc that they didn’t even bother including any kind of commentary and, while I want to avoid being labeled as some sort of Extras-police, I find this unacceptable in a Bluray disc.
Summary
I prepared myself to label The House Bunny an absolute disaster but the film, while far from groundbreaking in the “teen” romantic-comedy genre, had just enough laughs and cuteness to leave me feeling pleasantly surprised. While not as good as Clueless or Mean Girls, fans of either of those films should certainly check this out. This is very much a film aimed at the female of the species but I’m confident that plenty of guys will enjoy an opportunity to witness Anna Faris looking stupidly hot.
Rating ***
