Every film about a plucky dumb blonde shamelessly attempts to match the perfection of Judy Holliday in 1950 when she played the gun moll Billie Dawn in "Born Yesterday." Billie's crook-turned-legit boyfriend Harry (Broderick Crawford) wants to have her polished up to take out socially and calls in William Holden's character Paul to do the refining. Billie's awakening to the larger world and to her identity as defined separately from a man acts like a fable for second wave feminism. Aside from that film, I find the dumb blonde genre a cheap, one trick pony gimmick whether it features Marilyn Monroe, Goldie Hawn, Reese Witherspoon or Jessica Simpson. The most recent incarnation, "The House Bunny" starring Anna Faris is by far the most hateful of the bunch; it's devoid of any humour that is not also wretchedly sexist or misogynist. The writers Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith (also credited with the bullshit "Ella Enchanted" and "Legally Blonde") want to ensure they stay employed in Hollywood through metaphoric cock-gobbling and shitting on other women. I would have thought it an impossible task for two women to write a screenplay about a Playboy bunny without even the slightest critique of the franchise run by that viagra-fuelled incubus who sucks the life out of young women. Then I forget that the industry loves any lap cats of the patriarchy because they're so eager to show how hateful women are in every project.

"The House Bunny" begins with a voice-over from Shelley (Anna Faris) narrating the grim details of her life spent in an orphanage placed in the context of a fairy tale. Let's just say that "Cinderella" comes off as a radical feminist treatise in comparison with this shlock. Everyone gets adopted but poor Shelley, who is ugly and unwanted until she develops into a hottie during adolescence. Well then, everyone wants her because what higher aspiration could a girl have than being totally fuckable?

She moves into her dream house, the Playboy mansion!

Shelley has a cat named pooter (this is when I had to check to see if 14 year-old boys wrote the script) and hopes for the grand birthday wish of finally becoming a centrefold model. After the big party, she gets a letter from Hef saying now that she's 27, she's too old to be a bunny and has to move out. Some butler-type dude brings the letter, explaining that 27 is really like 59 in bunny years. Get it? Women have an early expiration date. They're pretty gross at any age over 18. There's plenty more knuckle-dragging humour, such as this exchange when the butler-dude brings Shelley breakfast in bed and the letter telling her she's washed up:

"Shelley, I put something in your drink"

"Thanks for telling me. I usually only find out much later.."

Let's have more jokes about women getting drugged and raped!

Hilarious.

Bereft, Shelley wanders around in slutware until she stumbles in her stripper shoes upon a sorority house, which she notes is just like "a mini Playboy mansion." Painful.

She becomes a house mother to the "losers" on campus. The Zeta sorority girls include geeks with glasses, a pierced angry feminist, a mute black girl and a pregnant student.

So it's racist in addition to misogynist.

You can see the rest of this dismal film coming a mile away.

Makeovers!

Boys!

Hef didn't really write the letter!

There's also Shelley's bad advice that we can use as a shorthand for the fucked up gender mythology that haunts the film, including "boys want what other boys want" and "boys don't like girls that are too smart." It's always already about the menz.

Even worse, when "The House Bunny" makes a play for redemption and tries to suggest that Shelley might actually have to *gasp* pick up a book in order to have a conversation with Oliver (Colin Hanks), it distills her book-learnin' into the same montage sequence as we're given for any makeover segment. Getting educated can be done just as quickly as finding the right push-up bra to maximize your décolletage. Ladies, if you just pull a dozen books from the library shelves and read a paragraph from each, you'll convince a dude that you're smart enough. Natalie (Emma Stone) seems to be the head of the Zeta girls, but wastes her time pining after some goober-brained fraternity dude who can barely string a sentence together. She has to hide her intelligence in order to be his girlfriend. She's so lucky to have him. Every woman onscreen lives for a man. Since it's set on a university campus, would it be too terribly much to ask to see at least one depiction of female aspiration or ambition that moves beyond shacking up with a dude?

There are also two scenes featuring the despicable trend of "boob punching."

I shit you not.

My brain yearned for a sound bleach scrubbing by the end.