That was the director's concept :-) The subway as inferno. (As such it wasn't even that original -- maybe you saw Luc Besson's.)

Since it is in a country I know nothing about

I'm curious: why did you (like most foreigners) believe that the film plays in a real country? Was it the Budapest Traffic Company's ridicuous intro [was it in your DVD version BTW?]?

Let's just say I've seen a lot of bloodied Hungarian faces in the last 24 hours.

Heh, then my photo choices are as distorting as he MSM :-) On my photos, you see a single bloodied face, and reports are of less than a dozen similarly serious injuries. The lack of basic law and order is cordoned off along two main roads and involved no more than a few thousand at any moment (not hundreds of thousands like in 1956) -- worse than a month ago, but still not beyond the scale of a big football riot.

Is it normal to have ticket-checkers?  Why not just use turnstiles?

I don't know why no turnstiles were installed originally, but I'm certain that they would severely limit capacity at rush hour. However, the ticket-checkers in real-life Budapest aren't specialised for the subway, and also control trams, trolleys and buses, where turnstyles would be a rather expensive solution. Also, in recent years, controls in the subway are conducted by groups of 6-10 controllers at the entrances, simultaneously at multiple stations -- when this was introduced, ticket purchases jumped by double figure percents.

Though we do have them on regular (non-subway) trains.

Controllers (who check tickets validated by passengers themselves with some machine) or conductors (who validate tickets)? The two are a different caste... The difference is not in politeness, but in the attitude of passengers without ticket towards them. (In a small part justified: some controllers, being paid for the number of culprits caught, try to catch regular month-card buyers who forgot to buy next month's in time.)

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}