At the Movies: 'Napoleon Dynamite' director takes another off-beat stab

Clearly trading on the unexpected success of his dry, deadpan, slacker comedy Napoleon Dynamite, director Jared Hess ups the stakes a bit with Nacho Libre by bringing in the John Belushi clone — actor Jack Black — to lay on his particular brand of lunacy.

And Black, playing a half-Scandinavian, half-Mexican monastery cook who dishes up evil-looking sludge to a band of hapless orphans, indeed delivers the goods necessary to enrapture the same type of audience.

With the aim of earning pesos to improve the awesomely awful monastery menu, Black's character teams with a street urchin/man to moonlight as a (rag)tag wrestling team.

They encounter an eccentric array of opponents in the Oaxaca town hall, usually emerging plenty the worse for wear, but are paid appearance money because they're ideal fall guys.

The wrestling — against two banshee, bearded midgets and, by contrast, assorted blocks of typical wrestler lard, for example — is quite fun from a visual point of view.

But Hess gives Black plenty of camera time to display his trademark idiosyncrasies — ranging from the expressive eyebrow tweaks to a madcap singing voice — but not forgetting his ample, roly-poly torso that is for the most part clad in turquoise tights and a Zorro-like red cape.

Black's funniest moments are when he serenades the movie's love-interest, a father fetching nun in the form of ac tress Ana de la Reguera, but his antics are matched frame for frame by his reed-slim sidekick, played by Hector Jimenez.

Largely weighing in with campy whoops and shrieks when surprised (or squashed flat in the ring by some mountainous opponent) Jimenez is immensely likable because even nerds would call him a nerd.

Looking more like a misplaced Aborigine with his tattered locks and a mile-wide smile, he will certainly pick up comedic offers on the strength of what he accomplishes here.

Ditto de la Reguera, a dead ringer for Penelope Cruz, and who achieves credibility as a foil in this movie without really having to do much more than gaze intently and purse and unpurse her lips.

(Briefly, too, she wears a nightgown that doesn't, you might say, bring her gender into question).

The flick in a nutshell: Slacker peculiar. If you don't slide into its off-beat groove early on, you'll be disappointed. If you do, you'll drift along cocooned in its ultimately happy haze.

Nacho Libre, rated PG presumably for some lavatorial crudities, is scheduled to play at Marco Movies through this week.