Hollywood is so reflexive about making sequels to hit movies that the mark of the trailing Roman numeral has become a kind of badge of dishonor. So when the new "Fierce Creatures" arrived with an accompanying explanatory buzz that it was really "A Fish Called Wanda II," one inevitably recoiled. "Wanda" was a fun trifle, but who wanted to see its stars go through the same farcical motions nearly a decade later?

Fortunately, they apparently feel the same way. "Fierce Creatures" turns out to be nothing like a sequel. It's closer to a tradition virtually unknown in the U.S. but more than familiar to the British makers of "Fierce Creatures": that of the stock company. Like a touring troupe or repertory theater, the new movie — a genial throwaway comedy about a frumpy zoo bought out by a media mogul — uses the same group of actors as "Wanda" in sometimes parallel and sometimes contrasting roles. Kevin Kline, for instance, plays another dimwitted egotist, whereas Michael Palin, afflicted by a stutter in "Wanda," this time around suffers from verbal diarrhea.

The old movie and the new share a similar spirit and sometimes similar kinds of comic business. But there's none of the tired contortions of sequelhood — the explanations of what happened since the preceding film, the attempts to cover for missing characters whose actors wouldn't sign on for another round, or the desperate efforts of screenwriters to cobble together some new plot that's kind of the same as the original but kind of different, too, and almost invariably awful.

"Fierce Creatures" apparently began life as a discarded Monty Python skit idea, updated by screenwriters John Cleese and Iain Johnstone to satirize the world of corporate media conglomerates. Cleese plays the director of a British zoo recently acquired as part of a megadeal by the Rupert Murdoch-like media baron Rod McCain (Kline). McCain expects 20 percent return on every investment, whether it's a radio station or a zoo. But Cleese has a plan: The violence-loving public will flock to the place, he reasons, if it disposes of all warm-and-fuzzy critters and displays only the nature that is reddest in tooth and claw. Fiercer creatures of a different sort enter the picture, too: Jamie Lee Curtis as a corporate climber and Kline, again, as the mogul's dull, vain marketing-exec son descend upon the zoo with schemes of their own.

It's rare for a movie today to take any sort of pleasure in the sounds of strange words, as "Fierce Creatures" does with its oddball menagerie of lemurs, wallabies, coatimundis and bandicoots. These small furry mammals — cute little hoppers that are hopelessly ill-suited to Cleese's scheme — are comical in a passive kind of way; they're best at rolling their eyes and looking droll as human beings pronounce the gnarled syllables of their names.

Kline's Vince, the marketer, is unhappy with such recessive antics; he wants more fireworks from the animals. At one point, he stares at a friendly but inert gorilla for a minute and then cries out, "Is that the show?" He conceives of a bigger and better show, with sponsors' logos plastered over the animals and the keepers' uniforms.

The real show, of course, is being put on by hapless humans working their way through the mechanism of another fine Cleese farce, with eavesdroppers trapped in closets, eyebrow-raising assumptions of naughty activities, and a requisite scene of rudeness to the patrons. Cleese is milder here than he was in the immortal "Fawlty Towers"; he does less physical comedy and relies more on his audience's foreknowledge of his bossy persona, but he still has two or three scenes of simple comic genius. And he's looking old and distinguished enough at this point to add an extra layer of absurdity to the film's repeated gag at his expense — other characters keep receiving the impression that he's having orgies with nubile animal-keepers and their charges.

Whether it's setting up Cleese to slaughter some animals who are simply too cute for the new "lethal weapon in every cage" policy, or killing off one of the main characters and devising a frenzied what-do-we-do-with-the-corpse routine, "Fierce Creatures" mostly sustains the kind of savagery that's necessary for true farce. It's only with Curtis' character that the film loses its edge and gets fuzzy-hearted: This exec has an epiphany staring into a gorilla's eyes, loses her bottom-line obsession and turns humanitarian. The conversion has no effect on her wardrobe preferences, which tend to the tight and bust-enhancing and regularly reduce Cleese to strings of escalatingly embarrassing Freudian slips.

"Fierce Creatures," which was directed by Robert Young ("GBH" and "Splitting Heirs") with help from Fred Schepisi, who shot a revised finale for the film, is mostly smart enough to stick to pure farce and let its animals take care of their own rights. It's a charming diversion, and it treads lightly even when it has something weightier on its mind — as when Palin's insect-keeper asks Cleese whether the deal-mad McCain has pondered the implications of E.F. Schumacher's philosophy. Small may be beautiful, but the makers of "Fierce Creatures" understand something that Hollywood these days too often forgets: In the right hands, small can be exquisitely funny, too.

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