Playboy Meets Legally Blonde in The House Bunny

By Broadside Staff Writer Sarah Buchanan

While certainly not the most brilliant comedy ever, The House Bunny is an amusing movie with a feel-good storyline and a lot of blonde jokes. Thriving on the stereotypical, it stars Anna Faris, of Scary Movie fame, as Shelley Darlington, a beautiful, blonde airhead and former Playboy Bunny who gets duped into thinking that she got kicked out of Hugh Hefner’s infamous Playboy Mansion.

Attracted to the familiar mansion-like qualities of a sorority house, Shelley becomes the house mother for the Zeta Alpha Zetas, the “loser” sorority that consists of an awkward and quirky bunch of intelligent, but cynical individuals who are in danger of losing their charter. To save their organization, the Zetas must recruit a number of new pledges.

To accomplish this, Shelley teaches the Zetas about boys, parties, and makeup in an effort to make them more popular and attract new girls into their sorority.

The comedy capitalizes on Faris’s ditsy blonde character to the point where a vast majority of the jokes come from the incredibly stupid things she says.

However, there are definitely a few priceless moments and clever touches that made the movie worth seeing. The interaction between Shelley and the Zetas is both funny and endearing to watch as she gains their trust and cooperation. The story moves along quickly and we catch a glimpse of everything you’d expect from a movie like this: parties, romance, and glamour.

If you like watching the reality TV show The Girls Next Door, or the Legally Blonde films, then you will probably like this movie. Shelley never wins a court case in a battle of wits, but she does walk away having learned a little more than she started out with, while the Zetas marry Shelley’s stylish enthusiasm with their own quirky individualism and enjoy their newfound popularity.

The House Bunny is now playing in theaters nationwide.