Grave Misconduct 21st Anniversary Edition Review

In 1990, I was the resident cameraman at Bowes Lyon House, a youth center and arts venue in my hometown of Stevenage that transformed once a week into Thee Klub Wiv No Name attracting artists like The Ragga Twins, The Bleach Boys. and The Cranberries. I was tasked with capturing the live performances on tape.

At the time I was an active member of The Bancroft Players, a renowned theater society based at the Queen Mother Theater in the neighboring market town of Hitchin. Mike Lukey, my best friend from my early school days, was the keyboardist and songwriter for the local band Budadada, now known as New Town Centers.

We had both tried in vain to make the eponymous film Ex & Lukes: The Motion Picture on Super 8 while we were still in school and realized that we could borrow Bowes Lyon’s camcorder and use it to finally make a movie and in a We’d put together a script for a couple of weeks, gathering a small cast of friends from the theater group and the band, many of whom had never acted before.

The plot revolved around the exploits of two so-called pillars of society, the Reverend Laurence Dressing (Ex) and Dr. Paul Toombes (Lukes), whose twenty-year friendship had seen them descend into corruption that led to murder, incest and, ultimately, the Doctor at least, suicide. It was thought that to help me age for the role of vicar my curls should be bleached, however due to the natural amount of red in my hair the best the barber could handle was straw yellow, which looked like orange or green under different light, leaving us with no choice but to present the film in black and white.

While the subjects were dark, the subject was treated as a black comedy, satirizing the Thatcher government’s privatization policies at the time and reflecting on what might have happened if the Church of England had been subject to strict commercial market pressures. ; Enter Archbishop Dorsal Fine played by Bancroft Youth Theater stalwart Julian Newman Turner, he gives the Vicar one last chance to turn the fortunes of St. Kilroy Church before it is listed for demolition and land redevelopment.

The Reverend Dressing has a more sinister motive to save the church, as its bell tower is walled with the corpse of a fallen lady from her past who began to blackmail when she became pregnant by him. The vicar summoned his good friend and hypnotist, Dr. Toombes, to discreetly dispose of the troublesome woman. If the church were torn down, their little secret would be uncovered with no alternative but to revitalize the church coffers in the easiest way possible by generating increased demand for funerals and the copious costs that accompany them.

In fact, we were allowed to film at St. Nicholas Church in Old Stevenage on the pretext that it was a community story about a group of local people trying to save the parish church. Just as cunningly, we were able to convince the director of Bowes Lyon to let us keep the camera for the course of a weekend (usually we had to return it before the offices closed) and this one exception provided an opportunity to shoot the lurid requirement. night scenes in the forest; No self-respecting, low-budget movie would be complete without them!

Once the Doctor had dispensed with most of his regular patients thus filling the St. Kilroy cemetery, the second act introduces the character of Georgina played by Claire Garvie, who had recently played Sandy in the Lytton Players production of Grease at the Gordon Craig Theater. . Georgina worked at the local daycare and was involved in a fatal car accident that resulted in the death of a young child for which she took responsibility. During a visit to Reverend Dressing for spiritual guidance, his dog collar slips off once more and he embarks on a May-September adventure with Georgina who quickly steps up to talk about marriage; Perhaps the clergyman believes that he can find salvation by rescuing the young and troubled woman.

Georgina also visits Doctor Toombes’ clinic for counseling and, while under hypnosis, it is revealed through flashbacks that perhaps he is not completely evil after all; While getting rid of the pregnant woman from his friend’s past, he managed to save the baby and handed her over to the Salvation Army, where she was taken in. Once he realizes that the vicar is about to unknowingly marry his own daughter, this tragedy of Greek proportions is too much for the Hippocratic practitioner to bear and guilty knowledge plunges him into a bite of depression and madness that culminates in death by his own hand.

Grave Misconduct was originally shot on a Panasonic M10 VHS camera and linearly edited directly to the U-Matic Beta-SP master tape over the course of two days. The equipment available at the time did not allow for complex effects, transitions or sound montage and the original now feels a bit tired and slow by today’s standards.

Lukes made a very short edit that looked more like a trailer to commemorate the film’s first decade, but I thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to produce a new edit to celebrate the film’s 21st anniversary using my newfound skills with Final Cut Pro X I wanted to eliminate many of the flaws in the original that have bothered me over the years, while keeping the plot and key performances intact; By cutting 21 minutes of footage and introducing an alternate soundtrack, I’ve injected a lot more rhythm and energy into it and now I consider this to be the definitive version.