Rating: 
Summary: YES, it's all very surreal
Review: Hi. Well I must say I am pleased with this purchase. Each film is very cool and interesting. It's all very cerebral. But you don't really need to brood over to enjoy. You can if you want but that would get boring. It's usually something you must loose yourself in in order to enjoy. i.e. pick a lonely day when you're feeling particularly despondent and sit in a dark room and watch. Not with your girlfriend because she'll get bored and hate you for being such a boring pseudo-intellectual. I can't the entire DVD at once because I fall asleep. There's no apparent coherent story line to any of them. Sometimes, if you try, you can make out a story or an underlying message, particularly in "the COMB". All the films are more like dreams. So that's fun. Buy this if you're into weird artsy stuff. If you don't get weird artsy stuff then go buy "ferris buelers day off". That Ferris. He's so silly.
Rating: 
Summary: ????????????
Review: I am an architectural model maker so for me it was interesting to see some of the constructions involved in this production.I had great difficulty in understanding what is the intention in the story telling. The documentary on perspective drawing was very nicely done. I wish there had been more use of the Brothers Quay to represent these types of productions.
Rating: 
Summary: girlie men?
Review: I briefly dated a girl who thought that this video was pretentious. She wrote terrible poetry and slept around so don't take her word. this is the amazing product of two grown men playing with dolls. these grown men are twins? That girl also thought that identical twins were "freaks of nature" and "unnatural". this may be true but I think their films are great. also,on a related note, I stood in the same room as Jan Svankmejer while he signed promos for Faust. I talked to his wife and pretended I didn't know what he looked like. I have never been so nervous in my life. I bet you anything these brothers might have felt the same way. buy this.
Rating:
Summary: But this DVD has coding defects.
Review: I have 3 DVD players/programs, and none of them was able to make a menu appear, thus preventing 3 of the 13 shorts from being viewable. Eager to see all of the Pennsylvania-born brothers' rich films, I embarked on a many-email exchange with Nicholas Mulligan of Kino, but he was unable to help. On my own I discovered a workaround: activate Title/Chapter on my remote and key in the missing 3 shorts as Titles 2, 3, or 4 + Enter. I rate the Quays' mysterious, visually striking artworks 5 stars (the transfers look gorgeous) and Kino's technical quality control 0 stars.
Rating:
Summary: Great Films, Terrible DVD
Review: I just wanted to leave a quick note about the quality of this DVD.
While the films in the collection are great for the most part, as a few others have noted, the DVD menu has severe problems which at best will present annoying noise on the main menu, and at worst will actually prevent you from viewing some of the content.
I find it hard to believe that this disc was produced with such low attention to quality.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, dark, evocative, beautiful and sublime
Review: I was quite literally blown away on seeing "Street of Crocodiles" 10 years ago. An incredible mix of dark surreal animation, moments in time and stunning cinematography. They have influenced so many styles of animation and film making since then and continue to create a brilliant organic style that will allways stand apart. Genius!
Rating: 
Summary: impossible to under rate this movie:
Review: I was ready to be swept away by the Quay brothers and their
"unique"..."bizarre" style. After the initial viewing I sat stunned at the thought of the money I had just spent for
nothing because nothing is what you get with this DVD. Highly
pretentious titles to these shorts are married with (to me)
clumsy stop action, incomprehensible and seemingly random
story lines (if any exist), music that is atonal, irritating,
and sadly lacking in any redeeming feature. Well, I could go on but won't. I wanted to like this but was unable to appreciate any part of it. I am deeply suspicious of anything that pretends to artistic merit because it is incomprehensible, disjointed, different, and chaotic. If you like clever animation please buy the stunning ANIMUSIC DVD-simply wonderful!
Rating:
Summary: Great, but overrated
Review: I'm not even going to write a proper review for this, since folks who are familiar with the Brothers Quay know all about it and those who have never heard of it will probably not be interested in it. For example if you've seen Institute Benjamenta or any Jan Svankmajer films you'll probably pick this up. If you haven't it's most likely not your cup of tea. I would like to take some of the reviewers to task though. Alot of you have automatically assumed that folks who enjoy Hollyood movies, Coca-Cola, TV, and American beer are total drooling idiots and would never enjoy something like this, which leads me to believe you are probably teenagers, or complete fools. I enjoy all of the above. I see no difference between watching Caddyshack and listening to AC/DC or watching Holy Mountain and listening to Napalm Death. It is possible for people to enjoy mainstream art and underground art equally.
I will say, that imo the Brothers Quay collection is slightly overrated, I prefer their film Institute Benjamenta, or the works of Jan Svankmajer myself.
Rating:
Summary: Rehearsals For Extinct Anatomies
Review: I'm not exactly sure how to describe the Brothers Quay work other than it's one of those things that transcends its genre and evokes real and powerful emotions in the viewer. These short films, all of which are masterpieces of stop-motion animation, are all very dreamlike and abstract, but the fact that you may not understand what's going on all the time doesn't really matter. What's important here isn't the plot or meaning, but the aesthetic and style, much like other (narrative and non-narrative) forms of art. Really, if I had to chose one word to describe the work of the Brothers Quay it would be "beautiful". My only complaint with this DVD is that the menus and indexing aren't quite set up right, so when one short ends, you have to manually hit the "menu" button on your remote to go back or it'll keep playing through to the next short. Regardless, these shorts are definitely worth having on DVD because of the superior picture quality and the convenience of being able to skip to the individual shorts (not to mention the fact that the DVD includes a few extras, like an interview with the Quays).
Rating:
Summary: Eye candy, brain candy, candy left out for the nightmares
Review: It's nice to have so many Quay shorts crammed together onto one tape, though some of their early films ("Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer" especially) tend to get a bit tedious unless you're really in the mood. I'm sure label/contract nonsense precluded them from including some of their music videos -- the Michael Penn and his Name is Alive sequences would have rounded this out wonderfully. The high points here -- "The Street of Crocodiles" and "The Epic of Gilgamesh" -- are so unlike anything else ever done, yet somehow so familiar, that they defy description. The are like a glimpse into the dreaming self, steeped in chittering dangers, endlessly self-elongating shadows and an Eastern European/Central Asian musical sadness so rich and deep, and so strangely flavored, redolent with the mixed smells of ancient motor oil, saffron, cinnamon, dried blood, sulphur and woodsmoke. A peek into something we all are but have not yet given a name to. Haunting, mesmerizing, creepy as hell, these films will stay with you for days. The dance of the screws in "The Street of Crocodiles" is especially jarring -- so visually logical when it's happening right before your eyes, yet nothing you'd ever have thought of before.
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