If I never see another Happy Madison produced film it will be all to soon. The latest installment to the so-called romantic comedy leaves me aching for a dentist for all the super sweetness that takes place. And all the pink that chokes every piece of clothing in this film, “The House Bunny.”
Ever wonder what happens to a playboy bunny after her time is up in the mansion? According to this she’s kicked out and made to be homeless. At least she does if she has been tricked by her competition. Shelley, is a highly energetic, overly hyper, too much pink wearing playboy bunny who experiences being kicked out of the mansion. She gathers her things and moves into her car. One incident where she thinks she is to go down on the cop after a miscommunication, because he wants her to take a Breathalyzer test, lands the blonde bimbo in jail for the night.
When she gets out she overhears some girls talking about a mixer and she follows them. After exclaiming they frat and sorority houses are like mini playboy mansions, she walks into Phi Iota Mu, or snob central. Shelley discovers just how mean people can be on the outside as the first girl she runs in to ends their conversation with “So nice.” The house mothers have no pity on the homeless bunny and tell her there is no room for her in any of the sororities. Until one comes to tell her “try Zeta, they’re house mother left because of hallucinations.” Seizing the opportunity, Shelley quickly goes to the Zeta house to enroll as their new house mother.
Instead of meeting gorgeous, brilliant and bubbly girls, Shelley meets the girl geek squad, who will end up losing their house if they don’t get thiry pledges by Rush Weeks. These girls are dressed in frumpy dark colored clothes that make them invisible to the world. But the girls are smart, weird, quirky and true to themselves, that is until Shelley makes them see they are ugly to the world. After a long transformation of the girls getting their hair, make-up, nails and every other possible thing done to them, including a metal detector for Mona and her piercings, the girls end up with more confidence and all eyes on them.
In some ways Shelley helps the girls to see that you can be beautiful outside and brilliant inside. But with that she ends up blinding the girls and they lose track of who they really are. When it’s discovered by Hugh that Shelley was tricked into leaving the house by a competitor, she is welcomed back, but chooses to stay with her house. However, that phone call is changed a few moments later when the girls of Zeta tell her that their issues with being beautiful conflicted with them being smart. Shelley returns to the mansion and the Zeta girls are left to their own devices to get the pledges they need to save their house.
The competition has other plans and does whatever they can to hinder the Zetas from getting their popularity, and their pledges. Everything from sabotaging kereoke, to throwing away their pledge invites. Nothing seems to stop the Zeta girls, until they have no one show up, then like a hot breeze on a cold day, Shelly comes back. She goes right to the meeting to save the house. Shelley gives off a speech that fills the girls with hope and in the end they end up with their thirty pledges, including their final one from the Phi Iota Mu.
The romance in this movie is like watching Legally Blond, all the tricks that Elle pulls to get a guy to notice her, Shelley does the same. She’s then completely baffled that the man she is interested in doesn’t pick up the cues. He wants a smart girl and Shelley is hardly smart. She gives a whole new name to dumb blond. This isn’t to say that she doesn’t get the boy in the end. The girls of Zeta help her come up with some topics to discuss with him, big words to impress him and a pair of glasses that make her look like a bug. When that fails, and Shelley leaves, she tells lover boy she’s going to Peru. Then when she comes back, the truth comes out and the boy doesn’t care who or what she was in her past.
I don’t feel bad spoiling the plot of this film, It’s easier and cheaper to watch the previews, it will spoil the movie for you. On a whole, I can’t say that I liked this movie. Maybe when I was growing up and in my teens I might have enjoyed this film. However I didn’t like this film now. It felt extremely shallow and sort of like it was telling girls; you don’t need to be smart if you are beautiful and you should be like everyone else instead of an individual.
In a world where how you look defines who you are, this is not the best movie to give a message to girls about being yourself. Even when the girls are given a chance to return to who they were, they don’t. In fact they state that they want to hang on to about forty percent of what Shelley gave them. That to me is like be yourself, but don’t be yourself completely. I’m glad I didn’t waste eight bucks to see this film in theaters, and sad that I did waste a buck to rent it.
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