June 4, 2009 | lists
On a city bus, your nostrils are often breached by the kinds of smells that keep garbage men so in demand with the ladies; and this, as you’re doomed to 8 mph and being overtaken by fleet footed hot dog vendors.
When you finally reach your destination, if you’re not motion sick already (astounding given how slowly these things move), you’re thanked for your troubles with a cloud of black smoke in the kisser, two fewer hours in the day and one less wallet.
The subway on the other hand, unless you’re stuffed into one in Japan by a cop mime, provides relative comfort.
A gauge of a city’s sophistication (unless it’s Cleveland), there are 15 cities in North America with light rail/subway systems, and we’ve had the opportunity to try out four of them and on only two occasions, saw someone urinating on a platform—which are pretty good odds, all things considered, given the relatively small circumference of a drunk’s indiscriminate pissing.
And you think your job sucks...
In Toronto, one of us had a gun waved in our face by tactical officers who stormed a train when a drunk passenger’s threats were taken too seriously (for the record, such threats did not come from one of us— swear) and waiting for the Brooklyn train at Bowery, we saw a rat the size of an overfed dachshund.
Still, there is no better bang for your transit buck than the underground, provided bores, drunks and perverts—i.e., those kept on the wrong side of the velvet rope on Ladies night— are avoided.
Unsurprisingly, this subterranean milieu has featured more prominently than dank rec rooms in popular film, most recently in what is likely a terrible remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3.
Next time your coat is caught in the doors, you’re Woody Allen to Sly Stallone’s un-credited thug in Bananas, or a one-person audience for something unspeakable pulled from a pair of shorts—think about how subways have kept more money in your wallet after a night in the bar than homely women, given those without driver’s licenses a chance to get laid and of course, contributed to pop culture at large.
Next stop, the Best Subway Movies of All Time (When the doors are chiming, please do not rush toward your computer monitor).
Wish I hadn't missed my stop.
Death Line. Family of cannibals descended from Victorian railway workers live in the bowels of the London Underground (don’t let their prudishness fool you, they really really like the taste of human flesh).
Passengers go missing in the subway system, permanently that is, but nothing is done about it as nobody suspects cannibals descended from Victorian railway workers living in the London Underground (the producers themselves hardly believed it). The cannibals (shouldn’t someone who dines on human flesh be a ‘humanitarian?’) are hunted down when a prominent public-transit funding politician is murdered, by the always incredibly awesome, though currently dead and not returning to the domain of the living any time soon, Donald Pleasance (Halloween, Cul-de-Sac, the inspiration for Dr Evil in You Only Live Twice).
Creep. Franka Potente from Run Lola Run (a film featuring more cuts than unlicensed surgery), gets locked overnight in a London subway station, pursued by a creepy coke-addled would-be rapist office co-worker in serious need of some remedial team building exercises. Her troubles don’t even begin to end there, as she’s pursued by just about everything except subterranean alligators as she navigates her way through the sewers. Capitalizing on the kind of horrible claustrophobia normally only encountered in rush hour or a bad nightclub, grisly Creep gets kudos here. 
Subway. Luc Besson is the king of transportation films. Without him, we’d have no Taxi, the Transporter, or Fifth Element (although if Chris Tucker had been more prominently featured than he was—that wouldn’t necessarily have been a bad thing. For more on Luc, please see our Top 10 Cab Driver Movies).
In Besson’s 1985 Subway, a safe blowing extortionist played by Christopher Lambert (a guy responsible for more bad acting than Vivid Entertainment) takes refuge in the Paris Metro, and is pursued by gangsters while befriending a roller skating brigand [Editor's note: how that would help you elude the law in one of the world’s busiest underground networks is up for some debate, as is curbing one's ability to hop a turnstile]
1 million bucks. The going rate for the lives of 40 passengers in 1974 and the cost-conscious mayor STILL balked
The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. Quentin Tarantino used stole The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3’s character color naming convention (Mr. Blue, Mr. Red, etc) for his inferior Reservoir Dogs. ‘Pelham’, referenced in the Beastie Boys’ song ‘Sure Shot’, is the story of a bunch of gangsters who set the public transit movement back more than the Big 3 combined, by hijacking a Bronx-bound NYC train.
The flick was recently remade with the consummately bland Denzel Washington taking on the Walter Matthau role, but not with Jerry Stiller reprising his Italian American cop. Bad ass British hijacker, played by Robert Shaw, memorably eaten in Jaws, demands a bigger-boat load of cash or he’ll start executing passengers.
From there begins a gripping chain of events in which tracks are cleared, numerous ‘Calling Pelham 1 2 3, calling Pelham 1 2 3s’ are uttered on CB radios and the clock ticks on the passengers’ lives.
"Warriors, come out to play..."
The Warriors. Based on Sol Yurick’s book, which drew from Anabasis by Zenophon, a pupil of Socrates (in the film, Coney Island is the Black Sea and gang members replace Greek mercenary soldiers) Walter Hill’s cult classic is one long chase from the top to the bottom of the New York City subway system.
Overalls are only scary in Deliverance
When a Bronx gang leader’s murder (CAN YOU DIG IT?) is falsely pinned on the title gang, instead of splitting money for a cab, they flee for their lives back to Coney Island riding the rails, as a bounty is placed on their heads and they thwart attacks from a variety of different gangs—from the scary (the Furies, demonic baseball players that spawned Eminem’s Warrior’s-inspired ‘Fight Music’ video) to the extremely less than menacing (a Union Square rollerskating in overalls gang that look like gay rugby players).
The dark, sinister, yet incredibly campy Warriors aesthetic has inspired Old Dirty Bastard, Slim Shady, Red Man, Offspring, Rockstar video games and ‘dress as your favorite gang’ bar theme nights.
Editor’s note: For obvious reasons, namely the phrase ‘best subway movies’ in the title, we’ve left out the aptly named While You Were Sleeping, about a lonely ticket seller. Sanda Bullock does feature prominently in our Actors Whose Crappy Movies are Always Shown on Airplanes. Also, Money Train, with Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson as step brothers (of course), has been omitted here. A scene early in Die Hard III involves a bomb on a subway train and Bruce Willis racing against time to diffuse. If anyone’s seen it, he shouldn’t have bothered.
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There are way more than 15 cities in America with with light rail/subway systems.
True enough. We should’ve specified subway systems.
while not taking place totally on a subway system,An american werewolf in london has a great sequence.