Two Liv Tyler movies in one day? Count me in!

The DVD Beat
Reviews by Nathan Weinbender

The Incredible Hulk
In 2003, Ang Lee made a noble effort to adapt “The Incredible Hulk” comic book series onto the big screen. The film’s visual style was remarkably good, but the story was dull, the drama turgid and the Hulk itself unimpressively rendered—it looked more like a Lump than a Hulk.

Now we have this sequel-of-sorts, which replaces the cast and director and has been retooled to be more of a straight-up summer blockbuster.

Edward Norton is a substitute for Eric Bana, and he’s a much better choice for the role of scientist-turned-science experiment Bruce Banner. As the film opens, Banner is living in secrecy in Brazil when he’s tracked down by a British mercenary named Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth). Blonsky has been assigned to capture Banner and hand him over to power-hungry General Ross (William Hurt), who has plans to siphon the Hulk’s power and use it to engineer an army of all-powerful superhuman soldiers.

Banner becomes a fugitive, reuniting with his old flame Betty (Liv Tyler), General Ross’ daughter. Naturally, he doesn’t want to be the Hulk anymore, but he’s forced to reconsider when Blonsky, who has been injected with a military-grade serum, has become an equally incredible mutant known as the Abomination.

This version of “The Hulk” is less ambitious than Lee’s version, but it’s more entertaining because of it. The special effects are better this time around, the action sequences have more oomph and the relationship between Norton and Tyler isn’t nearly as gooey.

And if you were curious, this movie finally resolves the mystery of Bruce Banner’s pants, which stay miraculously intact when he transforms into the Hulk: They have elastic waistbands.

Grade: B-

The Strangers
Rather than write a review for “The Strangers,” I’m tempted to simply direct you to a better film it very much resembles, a highly effective French thriller called “Them.”

Both movies begin with the same premise—a young couple in an isolated home is tormented and tortured by a group of masked killers—but whereas “Them” is stylish, scary and unpredictable, “The Strangers” quickly devolves into a depressing and pointless exercise in nihilism.

The young couple here are played by Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, and as the movie opens, their relationship is on the verge of disintegration. They’re staying in his parents’ vacation home, nestled so deep in the woods that if you were screaming for help…well, you know the drill. A trio of mask-wearing, knife-wielding psychos shows up and tries to slice and dice our protagonists, and what results is basically an extended chase sequence, with the good guys trying to outrun the bad guys and never getting anywhere

“The Strangers” has been made with a lot of skill, and the director, Bryan Bertino (making his debut), wrings a few legitimate scares out of this well-worn formula (there’s one particular shot—Tyler stands remote in the foreground as a masked man steps serenely out of the shadows in the background—that is absolutely masterful).

But once the flash of the opening scenes wears off, “The Strangers” falls back on rudimentary hack-and-slash elements we’ve seen time and time again, and Tyler and Speedman scream and cry their way through sequences that go from terse to sadistic as the script grows desperate for ideas.

Bertino has already mastered the superficial elements of moviemaking—he knows how to edit, score, light and frame a scene for maximum impact. He clearly has a future behind the camera; now let’s find him a competent screenplay.

Grade: C-