5/5 AWESOME!
  by T. Celestre (Lafayette, California United States)
Good, prompt service from Amazon yet again. And Hydra was great! I first saw this on the sci-fi channel after planning to watch it for months because of Jimmy Wlcek (who played Trent Malloy on a couple of seasons of WTR) and was pleasantly surprised to see George Stults (Kevin from 7th Heaven) in the movie as well. Yeah, the plot was rather standard and the special effects weren't any big deal, but that's part of the movie's charm. It's understated and simple, a real classic. Great movie. Go rent/buy, watch, and enjoy.

4/5 A lot better than expected
  by Bakuryuu Tyranno (England)
I originally heard of this movie in June 2008 and waited what seemed like forever to finally see it. It was not forever, but more like eleven months. Still, it had a lot of expectations to live up to and I also knew the majority of Sci-Fi Channel movies can be pretty disappointing.

So when it appeared on the UK listings, i watched it to decide if I should cancel my pre-order or not. Then i watched it again. Did i cancel my pre-order? No.

So why not? For one thing, the movie has slower, more deliberate pacing than a lot of its predecessors. The CGI is a bit better than the average Sci-Fi Channel movies too. It's not the peak of special effects quality in such movies, but, for example, in the opening scene the hydra bites a man's leg, and that shot looks more realistic than some of the biting shots in "Basilisk: the Serpent King" which actually had impressive CGI (for a low-budget movie).

In place of the usual Saturday morning cartoon human villain, we have... well, there's two human villains, neither of whom trust each other, and neither of whom have any leverage over the other leading to their scenes actually being interesting to watch. There's a couple of other minor villains (including the wife of one main villain), along with four hunters who do at least have more personality than the usual henchmen and are a bit more dangerous too.

They didn't completely do away with the redshirt henchmen found in your average Sci-Fi Channel movie, but if they had, the monster aspect of the movie wouldn't play a part until quite a while into the film.

The guy who plays Nolan does quite well; he's quite convincing as an ex-military type advising people on survival. I suspect the actor may have based his performance on that one ex=special forces guy who used to have a TV show dealing with such subjects.

There's some bad points of course; mostly what stands out is an extreem act of stupidity by one of the minor characters and, er... I guess without spoiling anything, all I can say is some aspects towards the end felt a bit rushed and contrived.

Another surprising aspect of competence was that not only did people (even "redshirt henchmen") have the sense to shoot a large carnivore in the head, but bullets actually work on this monster too! Granted, anyone familiar with the mythology could guess those two things together will only help this particular monster, but I can't really find fault with anything that means less incompetence in a Sci-Fi channel movie!