What makes it different from others?

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

This low budget film beautifully captures the darkness, obsession and overbearing despair, of Cornell Woolrich's depression era story updated to 1953. The stylistically Noir cinematography, with chiaroscuro lighting, reflections, deep shadows and clashing color schemes enhance the foreboding atmosphere. The tale is about Harlan and Lillian an unhappily married couple who basically exist with each other. Harlan is an alcoholic accountant who works long hours and commutes to his job. Lillian is a bored and ignored housewife who cooks for him. Once dinner is over Harlan heads for the corner bar Tatty's. During her day Lillian comes to life once hubby Harlan leaves for the office. She is frustrated and ripe for the plucking. Lillian and Harlan's latest crisis is the theft of their milk. This story is set back in the time when milk was still delivered by a milkman. I grew up in New York City in the '50s and we had an aluminum box next to the front door of our two family house, and it was into this aluminum box that the milkman delivered our milk. In Union City the milkman delivers to an apartment house, and he carries the bottles of milk in a wire tray stopping at the doors of the various apartments on his route, dropping off full bottles, picking up empties left on the floor outside the apartments. For the last two weeks someone has been drinking Harlan's milk and leaving the empty bottle. Harlan becomes increasingly filled with anger in reverse proportion to Lillian's indifference. Harlan thinks it's someone who lives in their apartment house and he devises a scheme to catch him. The following evening, Harlan gets a unopened bottle of milk from the refrigerator, ties a fishing line around the neck of the bottle, places the bottle outside the door and runs the fishing line back to the bedroom. Getting into bed Harlan winds the line around his finger turns off the light and goes to sleep.A tug on Harlan's finger sends him running to the apartment door. Flinging it open Harlan finds a vagrant sitting on the floor guzzling down his milk. Harlan knocks the bottle out of the young vagrant's hand spilling the milk on the floor. There ensues a violent tussle between Harlan and the man ending with Harlan beating the man's head on the floor repeatedly until he stops struggling. A large flow of blood from the man's head sends Harlan into shock. He must do something with the body, the sound of the apartments elevator spurs Harlan into a panic. He drags the body into the empty apartment across the hall and hides it temporarily in a Murphy bed. When Harlan goes back to remove the body from the empty apartment after he has frantically cleaned up the blood and milk out in the hall, and thrown his bloody pajamas down the incinerator, he discovers that he can't open the door to the Murphy bed, it's jammed. In the days that follow Harlan begins to go slowly insane hallucinating images and thoroughly neglecting Lillian.When no one has yet discovered the corpse and the newlywed new tenants of the empty apartment show up Harlan goes completely over the edge in true Noir fashion. Union City is a low budget production, but that fact contributes to the claustrophobic feel of the film which compliments the Woolrich story. None of the actors really stand out aside from Dennis Lipscomb who gives off a demented Jack Lemmon vibe. This is a must for Cornell Woolrich fans, entertaining but a 6/10 for this DVD.

Harlan a whinny repressed accountant lives with his adorably bored housewife Lillian in an apartment building in New Jersey. Somebody is stealing a sip out of their milk bottle every morning and Harlan becomes obsessed in trying to capture the culprit. Although his plan becomes unstuck when the unspeakable happens and soon his trying to put the horrific deed behind him. Although it's harder than he thinks and it's taking on a toll on his already fractured relationship with Lillian. She dreams off escaping this life and she sees this opportunity with her relationship with building superintendent Lance.After my long awaited viewing, I'm left rather bemused by it all. Obviously it's going to be a love or hate affair. Your pick. I'm leaning more towards the former. I just don't think there'll be much middle ground. You can easily see that "Union City" is perfect for repeat viewings to get a hold of every little, significant detail. Think of early David Lynch… like "Easerhead" and you'll know what I mean about being technically limited and strangely dark. Some shots you can clearly see the boom mike appear and it can be distracting. People might say that the technical side of the production is what brings it down and I can see were they're getting at. Otherwise with what Reichert had to work with, he did a resourcefully able job. On that front what we get is a highly moody neo-noir, art-house piece that's on a zero budget and benefits from it's cheaply few, claustrophobic sets in drumming up that anxious, glum and bizarre nature stemming off the film's peculiar characters and storyline.The oddball premise is taken off Cornell Woolrich's 1937 short story "The Corpse Next Door", which goes on to share some similarities to Poe's "The Telltale Heart". So it's all about the progressive guilt and stress of a secret that eventually cracks to lead to ones own self-destruction. Also the obsession of one task, leads to the breakdown in communication of the one thing, which needs the attention. He takes his wife for granted, as nothing more than a material object. The emotionally engaging story mingles with these cards rather neatly with precision and a wryly-black sense of humour. While having a creaky structure, the jittery rhythm and awkward turns only enhanced the film's magnetic atmosphere and credibly crafty approach. This is one of those mellow exercises that you have to have patience, as the film's momentum leisurely ticks along and it's filled with long stretches of silence. Can be quite a drag, if you're not geared up for it. The script is pretty sparse and when there's dialogue its mostly quite trivial.Director Marcus Reichert paints an edgy picture that dabbles in the surreal without losing that serious touch, but visually he mixes the lighting, colour scheme and tight camera-work to convey the ever-changing tenor. From grafting away tension to letting the time slowly go by. Reichert's stylised feel makes it way into the performances.Dennis Lipscomb's exceptional portrayal as the erratically selfish Harlan sticks out compared to the deadpan performances of the rest. This suits how his paranoid character is effecting the actions of those around him. The fetchingly sincere Deborah Harry (in her film debut role) is suitably solid in a sensitively frustrated housewife seeking a way out of the unhappy marriage. It didn't turn out to be much of a stepping stone for her film career, despite her strong presence. Everett McGill gives a likable, level-head performance as the building superintendent Lance. Providing reasonable support are CCH Pounder and Sam McMurrey. Of small interest Pat Benatar shows up in a minor role towards the end. There were another recognizable names that tagged along for the ride. You had Monty Montgomery as creative producer and Kathryn Bigelow as script supervisor. Also Chris Stein (Deborah Harry's fellow band member of Blondie) chips in with an effectively wistful music score that uncannily experiments with a variety of music styles. Namely a smooth blues flavor.This influentially quirky Indie flick is a hard one to recommend, but there are enough elements and a very unhinged tone for cult fans to get something out of this unconventional foray.

Union City was to be the vehicle (many of her fans thought) that would launch Deborah Harry, lead singer of Blondie, into screen superstardom. It didn't happen, though Harry went on to appear in numerous movies. But in Union City, she's kept in drab, dark locks until the very end, and gives a stylized, one-note performance, as though she were in a skit. No doubt that was at the prompting of writer/director Marcus Reichert, who made a rigidly stylized movie that looks almost cartoonish – though today, `like a graphic novel' might be the better phrase.And that isn't exactly a put-down. The achievement of Union City lies in sustaining interest despite the fact that very little, really, happens. It takes place in 1953, in a tired old apartment house across the Hudson from Manhattan (with a couple of excursions to a corner saloon). Accountant Dennis Lipscomb, a master of the paranoid personality style, is obsessed with a milk thief who drinks from the bottle delivered every morning. His feckless wife (Harry) doesn't pay much attention to his irrational rages, and he in turn pays little attention to her, at least where it counts – she's carrying on with the building superintendent (Everett McGill). When Lipscomb finally catches the thief, he accidentally kills him and stows the body in a Murphy bed in a vacant apartment.Most of Union City is a mood piece, with Lipscomb hitting the bottle to drown his guilt and Harry sticking daffodils into her underthings to vent her sexual frustration. The moods are expressed in the movie's distinctive look, with garishly saturated hues glowing through the heavy gloom – and some of that look is echoed in later movies like the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn't There, in David Lynch's Blue Velvet, even in Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy. But Reichert doesn't just surrender to the atmospherics; at the end, when Harry unveils her bottle-blonde tresses, like Tippi Hedren in Marnie, he delivers a twist (courtesy of Cornell Woolrich, who wrote the original story) that daringly relies on the viewer to fill in. For some reason, the print of this movie released in Canada runs some three minutes longer than the American version. Those three minutes contain a scene in which Harry – like Arlene Dahl in Slightly Scarlet, like Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8 – scrawls on a mirror with lipstick. (Maybe keeping that scene intact would have given Harry the push to stardom she craved.) Union City can be counted a success (though not a popular one), paving the way for a second-phase cycle sometimes called neo-noir.

Wonderful low key film about a husband so obsessed with having a few sips of his milk stolen that he fails to pleasure his beautiful young wife for so long that she does it herself in a wonderfully touching scene. This was the standard artists' claim against the materialism of the 50's in which this story seems to be set. It's typical film student's protest against straight society's misplaced priorities in which the starving artist appears the hero, but is imaginative enough and with the right mix of humanity, suspense, plot twists and lingerie touching to make it pleasant to watch. And the ending is satisfying.The Dolacoids refers to the Nazi theory of racial superiority based on the shape of the skull in which the long headed or dolacoid race is destined to rule. The former Stanford professor Thorsten Veblen, more known for his "Theory of the Leisure Class" -- the groundbreaking analysis of conspicuous consumption, wrote a brilliant satire of Nazi race theory entitled The Rise and Fall of the Dolocoid Race in which he proves that Dolocoids are destined for extinction because they are so concerned with their status and conspicuous consumption that they fail to have time to perform their filial duties, and hence produce no offspring, while the roundheads seem to make that a priority.This movie does a great job of working this theme. And I do mean that the scene in which a beautiful young woman like Blondie, is neglected for the sake of a sip of milk is tragically moving. Boy some guys really know how to screw up.