’Bunny’ a star-struck sorority party

Just in time for back-to-school comes “The House Bunny,” which won’t teach you anything new or useful, but it will prepare you for sorority rush.

Well, its depiction of Greek life isn’t all that accurate, but that’s beside the point. The entire purpose is to showcase Anna Faris, star of the “Scary Movie” franchise, whose sunny disposition and solid comic timing make “The House Bunny” a whole lot more enjoyable than it ought to be.

Faris stars as Shelley, a perky Playboy bunny who gets kicked out of Hef’s mansion and becomes the house mother for Zeta Alpha Zeta, a sorority full of misfits.

Actually “full” is stretching it, since the Zetas only have seven members. They need to come up with 30 pledges to avoid being kicked off campus and having the mean-girl Phi Iota Mus take over their house.

And so Shelley – with her itty-bitty outfits, pouf of platinum hair and an endless stream of malapropisms – transforms these wallflowers into Pussycat Dolls, and turns the Zeta house into the place to be.

The ever-likable Colin Hanks (looking eerily more like dad Tom with each film he makes) co-stars as the first nice guy ever to show an interest in Shelley, which discombobulates her even further.

Rumer Willis (as in daughter-of-Bruce-and-Demi) and “American Idol” runner-up Katharine McPhee don’t get much to do as a couple of fellow Zeta sisters.

Pro athletes Matt Leinart and Shaquille O’Neal appear as themselves, partying at the Playboy mansion, with Hugh Hefner and the “Girls Next Door” – Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt and Kendra Wilkinson – making a few appearances as well. You know, just to ground the movie in reality.

– Christy Lemire, Associated Press

“Death Race”

Of all the Z-movies in the Roger Corman catalog, they had to remake “Death Race 2000.”

If the original “Death Race,” with its murderous road rally drivers who take down pedestrians for “points,” seemed darkly prophetic when it came out back in 1975, the new one feels ripped from the pages of tomorrow’s TV Guide.

Paul W.S. Anderson, director of video-game adaptations such as “Resident Evil,” re-imagines this cars-and-carnage thriller as a video game come to life, with convicts racing and killing each other for their freedom.

Jason “Stick Shift” Statham is Jensen Ames, an ex-driver framed for his wife’s murder. He winds up on Terminal Island, the prison where the worst of the worst are held.

And there he’s given the choice – drive, or else, in a three-day race through the island’s ruined warehouses, factories and docks in self-modified muscle cars: Mustangs, Ram trucks, Chrysler 300s, Porsches.

The vehicles are armed with machine guns and the like. They have James Bond-style oil slick/smoke-screen defense gadgets. And there’s a “navigator,” a pretty female inmate. Because the whole thing is pay-per-view, it’s not just about the killing; it’s about the cleavage.

Whatever plot there is crawls into the backseat, and then the trunk, as “Death Race” really is about the creative ways these nuts find to kill each other.

Statham, at least, gives fair value. It’s impossible to watch the scowling, bullet-headed ex-British Olympian without realizing, “I really need to do more sit-ups.”

It’s still a Z-grade B-movie, an excuse for a next-generation video game (the original movie became an arcade game in the ’70s). But with most everybody involved at home in this milieu, at least “Death Race” feels more like a sprint than a marathon.

– Roger Moore, The Orlando Sentinel