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The only reason you should see The House Bunny is for the bubbly sexiness of Anna Faris, who is far more enjoyable than the movie itself.

The House Bunny can thank one person – and one person only – if it becomes a huge success at the box office – and that is its star Anna Faris. Bunny is another low-brow, unoriginal but often enjoyably witty effort from Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison production team. Bunny’s chief redeeming quality is the comedic charms and bubbly personality of Faris, who saves the film from being an outright disaster and who has all the best moments in the movie.

Faris is Playboy Bunny Shelly, an orphan who has spent most of her life in the Playboy Mansion with Hugh Hefner and all his beautiful women. She’s celebrating her 27th birthday and hopes to be the next big centerfold, until she’s tossed out of the big house by Hef due to her age. Shelly is once again an orphan until she meets the Zeta Alpha Zeta, a group of socially inept girls who could use a makeover, not to mention 30 more pledges, or they’ll lose their house.

Shelly, as the new house mother, gives the girls a makeover, helping transform the girls to popular, voluptuous women. She not only helps the girls discover who they truly are, she hopefully will help save the sorority from being taken over by a rival, evil sorority on campus. The only person that Shelly has trouble changing is herself, as she struggles to find her identity with her new love interest Oliver (Colin Hanks). Shelly must do all she can to save Zeta and the girls and learn valuable lessons in the process.

The House Bunny is as low rent as they come, but altogether saved by the funny Faris, who can be bubbly, dense and sexy at the same time, while possessing a comic timing that would make even Dane Cook jealous. Faris has had years and all those Scary Movie sequels to hone her comic timing, and she’s a better actress in need of better material.

Faris’ simple flirtatiousness, wittiness and charm (“you should go for a more natural look” she mistakenly tells a transvestite) are the most memorably amusing parts of Bunny. Her character’s Exorcist-type voice of remembering names is the funniest (and creepiest) thing in the movie.

Everything else in Bunny doesn’t work near as good, though its casting is certainly intriguing. Hanks, (Tom’s son), looks altogether befuddled, while Vacation movies alum Beverly D’Angelo, in a brief part, is altogether wasted as a sneering rival house mother (interestingly, she also seems to be hiding a big tattoo on her neck). As for the Zeta girls, there’s Emma Stone (also seen in The Rocker) who has a few witty moments as their geeky leader transformed to hot chick, along with Katherine McPhee (yes, the one from American Idol) as a pregnant college girl, not to mention a strikingly pretty Rumer Willis (Bruce and Demi’s oldest girl) as another geeky girl with some unique head gear.

As for Bunny’s story, if all of this school-makeover business sounds familiar, that’s because it’s is written by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, the team who wrote the first Legally Blonde and the Channing Tatum-Amanda Bynes vehicle She’s the Man, both of which have familiar themes done better.

Bunny is all low-brow and predictable (no more penis jokes, please), but would’ve been far better with a better director than Fred Wolf of Sandler’s team, responsible for the dreadful Strange Wilderness. Wolf only enhances the crudity of it all (when a Z falls from the house, all that’s left is T&A - ugh) instead of any genuine character development. It’s also quite disconcerting in an age of female equality that the film’s central message is very similar to what happened at the end of Grease: make yourself over into a slut, dumb yourself down a little and you’ll be popular in no time.

What matters most is not the second-rate acting, the slack story or any mixed messages it sends. Bunny could be a box-office hit based on the sheer bubbly sexiness of its leggy star, Faris, who should graduate to better comedic material. She’s all you’ll remember from this trite but enjoyable late summer movie entry.

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