In theaters:

NACHO LIBRE, directed by Jared Hess, written by Hess, Jerusha Hess and Mike White, 91 minutes, rated PG.

The new Jared Hess comedy, “Nacho Libre,” puts another monkey on Jack Black’s back, but this time it isn’t several stories tall, it doesn’t have a thing for blondes and it doesn’t famously destroy New York real estate.

The monkey in question is the script, which poses the sort of promising premise that tends to make for entertaining television ads, but not necessarily for a movie that lives up to those ads.

With the exception of a few funny sight gags, most of the film’s best moments have been revealed in its trailer and advertising campaign – the cheapest trick in the book. As such, the movie, which Hess (“Napoleon Dynamite”) based on a script he co-wrote with Jerusha Hess and Mike White, builds expectations but delivers disappointments.

This isn’t a bad comedy – it’s just a mediocre comedy, which is somehow worse because throughout you can see what it could have been if its jokes had focus that led to bigger laughs.

In the film, Black is Brother Ignacio, a Mexican monk whom we see in flashback as a hefty child who covets lucha libre, the underground wrestling world native to Mexico. Now, as a friar who helps the plight of young orphans, Ignacio leads a secret life of sin, coveting the current luchardors of the day while also pining for the love of the orphanage’s new nun, Sister Encarnacion (Ana de la Reguera), whom he’d like to lure away from – how to put this delicately – Christ.

Ignacio’s deceptions run deeper. In some circles – the lucha libre sort – he comes to be known as Nacho Libre, the hooded wrestler with the sizable paunch and the unfortunate flatulence problem whose wrestling skills are a joke. Joining him in the ring is his toothy sidekick, Esquelto (Hector Jimenez), who shrieks like a pinched soprano whenever he is tossed into the air and helicoptered to the mat, which turns out to be often.

Presumably, the film’s pleasures come from watching Black wear a fright wig, bare his bouncing belly, and flex his butt in unflattering lycra. There are some laughs to be had in that, but they evaporate quickly, leaving audiences to hinge their hopes on a story line that builds to the big match between Nacho and his nemesis – the huge, hulking luchador, Ramses (Cesar Gonzalez).

Along the way, Hess slaps the face of political correctness by unleashing a sideshow of characters that seem to have sprung from the mind of director Tod Browning (“Freaks”). And yet even they are only passably interesting. The trouble with “Nacho Libre” is that it comes up too short too often to make it worth the trouble.

Grade: C

On video and DVD:

THE HILLS HAVE EYES, directed by Alexandre Aja, written by Aja and Gregory Levasseur, 105 minutes, rated R.

In spite of all the blood it sheds, all the body parts it lobs off, and all the savagery it unleashes, Alexandre Aja’s remake of the 1977 Wes Craven classic “The Hills Have Eyes” struggles to maintain energy, with its only narrative drive coming from the fact that its nasty streak of violence tends to drive people out of theaters. That was the case at my screening last March, with several members of its target audience unhappily filing out midway through.

It was tough to blame them.

The film begins with archival footage of nuclear testing interlaced with actual shots of disfigured children, some of whom appear to be deceased. The children and their deformities are shown in closeup before they dissolve into mushroom clouds. This is entertainment? Aja thinks so, but then his movie really gets down to business.

It cuts to the New Mexico desert, where the people who were affected by the nuclear fallout as children now are angry adult mutants who thrill at the idea of slamming pickaxes into the backs, faces, torsos and limbs of their unsuspecting victims. They do this, we learn, because they’re furious to have been left behind and forgotten by the rest of the country after the nuclear testing. Fair enough. But why present their case in a movie that refuses to allow them a trace of sympathy? A more effective, timely remake would have allowed us to root for them as they fought big government.

But forget logic. Since Aja resists the idea that what is left off screen and to our imagination often is more terrifying, he shows us everything. As such, his film trips on its own entrails – sometimes quite literally.

The movie follows the Carter family, that has left Cleveland for a vacation that finds them detouring through this desert. After the aforementioned carnage that opens the show, what ensues is 45 minutes of long-winded tedium before the movie launches into an hour of unrelenting murder, cannibalism, rape, the grotesque torture of a pregnant woman, the rough handling of her infant child, a burning crucifixion and other atrocities as the Carter family is slowly carved down to only a few.

Where is the fun in a movie like this? There are no jolts, no flashes of humor, no camp aspect, no broad wink at the audience – just bloodletting that crosses the line. Those who want it can have it.

Grade: D

Visit www.weekinrewind.com, the archive of Bangor Daily News film critic Christopher Smith’s reviews, which appear Mondays in Discovering, Fridays in Happening, and Weekends in Television. He may be reached at Christopher@weekinrewind.com.