BY NATHANIEL BELL >CORRESPONDENT

In "The House Bunny," the endearingly dippy Anna Faris sports a pair of long, pink ears as Shelley, an aspiring centerfold who finds herself unceremoniously booted out of the Playboy Mansion the day after her 27th birthday. At the Mansion, 27 is the new 59 in Bunny years.

How will she survive when her job skills are limited to mixing drinks and administering makeovers?

Wandering the streets of Beverly Hills, Shelley soon finds herself at the doorstep of an unpopular sorority house populated by a group of female pariahs. The foremost of these gawky girls (played by the husky-voiced Emma Stone) worries that the house is in danger of being voted out of existence. Shelley has a plan: Employ her as their "house mother" and she will get them votes … and boys. Soon she's dispensing valuable beauty tips ("The eyes are the nipples of the face") and transforming the luckless loners into fabulous young socialites.

Faris' clueless innocence and pretty features make stupidity charming, even sweet. It's a performance that nearly redeems an utterly formulaic comedy, and affirms her position as one of our brightest comedians.

Although the script by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith offers Faris plenty of juicy gags (one of which involves a steaming manhole cover and an evening gown), the movie seems to be in conflict with itself. Is it a raunchy college romp, like "Animal House" on estrogen? Or is it a feel-good comedy that tugs at the heartstrings, like a Disney jaunt? "The House Bunny" isn't fully committed to either idea, settling uncomfortably for something in between.

Some of the characters feel barely sketched in - just who is Oliver (Colin Hanks), the affable young man volunteering at the neighborhood nursing home, and what, exactly, does he see in Shelley?

The movie is chock full of those horrible, sentimental payoffs we've come to expect from factory-assembled comedies, and the agony of the final scenes is unmitigated by the generally cheery message that it's OK to be yourself, even if your greatest attribute is your incandescently glowing skin. The sorority girls, however, are amusingly differentiated (the bookworm, the Goth, the shy one, the pregnant one, etc.), and the movie even finds a plum role for Hugh Hefner (playing himself, of course), which has to count as some kind of seal of approval.

THE HOUSE BUNNY

PG-13: sex-related humor, partial nudity, brief strong language.

Starring: Anna Faris, Colin Hanks, Emma Stone.

Director: Fred Wolf.

Running time: 1 hr. 38 min.

Playing: Area wide.

In a nutshell: Film is strictly formula, but Faris is funny.