What on Earth is Shaye St. John – The Trigger's Compilation? After perusing the DVD last night, I'm still not completely sure I can answer that question properly. As best I can tell, Shaye, a puppet of some sort, is a former model/actress who has somehow lost her legs. She lives with a burnt doll named Kiki who has the ability to move things with his/her mind and to fly under his/her own power at random. Together they have a series of misadventures in the form of some episodic short films called Triggers (presumably named as the events in them tend to trigger a reaction from Shaye, who appears to be quite insane and suffering from some sort of mental illness).

This DVD contains thirty-one Triggers in total. Some of them are as short as a minute in length, others go one for three minutes or more. None of them make a lick of sense and most of them are quite horrifying despite the absence of any supernatural elements (aside from Kiki's powers), monsters, violence, blood or gore. While not horror material in the traditional sense, the live action/stop motion animation and puppeteering in these clips is intentionally disturbing and quite successful at getting under your skin. When Shaye freaks out because she's in the bathroom and Kiki is smashing itself into the window repeatedly, it's pretty damned creepy, even if you don't really know why any of it is happening or how, for that matter.

Other episodes include Shaye trying to feed her cat some 'Kitty Candy' (Cheerios) on the porch while the camera cuts back to her wigging out in the corner for reasons we're never privy to. We get to check out some clips from her one woman/burnt doll stage show and we get to watch plenty of footage of her fondling her prosthetic legs and oohing and awing over her gams. It's all very strange and made even stranger by the fact that the filmmakers bombard us with crazy video toaster graphics and assault us with an extremely aggressive and screwy sound mix.

In short, I don't get it. I don't understand this material at all. I'm not entirely sure if it's utter crap or if it's some sort of evil genius. I will say this though, it held my attention and I had no problem getting through the material in one sitting. On that level, in that it held my attention, it was completely successful though I'm not sure if that's a testament in favor of the filmmaker's abilities or against my personal tastes and mental well being. There's definitely a really twisted sense of black humor underneath all the bad video effects and weird burnt doll high jinks. There's also some true creepiness to it all as well, a lot of the imagery is cringe inducing and this is definitely some scary stuff but again, it's difficult to explain why. I suppose an inherent fear of burnt dolls and creepy puppet things got to me somehow.

This was just weird. Really, really weird. My mind is still reeling… I don't get it. But I want more.

Video:

Everything here is fullframe and I'm assuming that's how it is supposed to be seen judging by the compositions and camera work. As stated, with the video effects and mixed media used to create this work, everything looks insane. Don't go in expecting crystal image clarity, that isn't going to happen nor should it. The video quality, intentionally degraded and fuzzed out as it may be, does do a pretty effective job of accentuating the central characters and their damaged psyches. There's plenty of pixelation, print damage, and strange image distortion throughout but it works in favor of the material, not against it.