Kat Dennings, from left, Anna Faris, Katharine McPhee, Emma Stone and Rumer Willis hop along in The House Bunny.

Columbia pictures

The plot outline for The House Bunny must have made feminists everywhere gag:

A former Playboy Bunny becomes the house mother to a group of losers at a down-for-the-count sorority and turns the place around by giving them a crash course in dressing and acting sexy to attract boys.

Fortunately, The House Bunny is a lot more than that. After all, it was written by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith who not only are women but had collaborated previously on such feminist-sensitive hits as Legally Blonde, Ella Enchanted and She’s the Man. Think of The House Bunny as a slightly sexier Legally Blonde, with a knockout, sweet and empathetic performance by Anna Faris as Shelley Darlington, who finds herself homeless after getting kicked out of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion.

Faris, best known for her roles in the Scary Movie series, gets to break out here as Shelley, who is charmingly clueless yet with a native intelligence that trumps all the naysayers who keep trying to put her down. As Shelley, Faris is marvelously ditzy, but nevertheless always gets to the bottom of problems and manages to turn things around. Her sunny, refreshing, never-give-in personality is a plus.

In pink halter top, very short white shorts and tottering on her white platform shoes, Shelley is a breathtakingly startling sight when she walks in on the girls at Zeta Alpha Zeta looking to become their house mother. The rundown house is down to its last, beleaguered seven members and they’re not going to be there for long if the snooty, well-scrubbed girls at the rival, very snazzy sorority house across the street have their way. If Zeta doesn’t come up with 30 new pledges, the sorority will be disbanded and the rival girls will take over their house.

Ah, Shelley sees work to be done here and not only in signing up lots of new girls. The Zeta gals, in this movie’s over-emphasized way of looking at things, are a group of dowdy misfits who have no idea how to attract the opposite sex, save for the girl who is seven months pregnant. The others include a girl encased in body armor because of her poor posture, a recluse who hides in her room and has never spoken to any of the others, the Idaho farm girl who has hidden out on the California campus for nine years so she doesn’t have to go back home.

Although they look askance at the sunny, perpetually cheerful Shelley, she does have one ally in Natalie (Emma Stone, currently in The Rocker) who decides that Shelley may be their last chance to save the Zeta house.

Shelley’s campaign to remake the girls in an image of herself by giving them some 21st-century fashion sense and social skills begins as wobbly as Shelley herself is on her platform shoes. A car wash to raise money for the house, with Shelley standing on the hood of a car in one of her most alluring outfits, begins well, but finishes with a thud that sends the boys running. Things go better with her Aztec party in which a virgin is “sacrificed” in a steaming “volcano” that creates a campus buzz and is staged with elaborate comic effects by director Fred Wolf, a longtime writer for Saturday Night Live from 1991-97. But this success only ramps up the determination of the girls at the rival sorority to close Zeta down.

Yes, it’s the old “uppity snobs against the campus misfits” theme that has fueled at least one movie a year. But The House Bunny has some surprises as well as Faris’s very funny performance to boost it to a much higher plane than one might have thought. Shelley’s colorfully odd way of delivering a phrase, such as when she says “My heart’s pounding like a nail,” fit her character well and add a daffy sense to the film. Along the way to changing the Zeta girls, Shelley herself embarks on her own makeover, poring over books in the campus library and winning the attentions of a young volunteer named Oliver (Colin Hanks, Tom’s son) at a nursing home. When Oliver tells her that he works at a nursing home, she announces that she’s happy someone has provided homes for nurses.

But Shelley’s efforts on both fronts — to remake the Zeta girls and to remake herself — are fraught with complications that Shelley hasn’t foreseen until almost too late. It’s all amusingly accomplished with some laugh-out-loud lines that keep this Bunny hopping.

*** 1/2The House Bunny

Starring: Anna Faris, Colin Hanks, Emma Stone, Kat Dennings, Hugh M. Hefner, Christopher McDonald, Beverly D’Angelo.

Rated: PG-13, contains adult themes, nudity, brief profanity.

mjanuson@projo.com