10 People Who Copied Movies In Disturbing Ways

2. Money Train's Fire Attacks Were Replicated By Two Real-Life Criminals

Money Train Chris Cooper as The Torch
Sony Pictures Releasing

1995's Money Train stars Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson as two cops attempting to hunt down and apprehend a serial killer known as The Torch.

One of The Torch's horrible methods is to approach a subway token booth, spray some gasoline inside, and threaten to set the attendant on fire unless they hand over the cash. We see The Torch do this a couple of times throughout the story, and these scenes inspired a pair of real-life criminals to enact a similar plot not too long after the movie's release.

In November '95, two men took some flammable liquid and a match and set a subway token booth ablaze, with the attendant trapped inside. This attendant - 50-year old Harry Kaufman - suffered second and third-degree burns over most of his body and died of his injuries two weeks later.

Understandably, the authorities pinned some of the blame for the attack on the fire booth sequences in Money Train, due to the fact that the movie was playing in cinemas at the time. There were also a couple of similar token booth attacks surrounding the movie's release, but thankfully, none of these resulted in any deaths.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!