Gangabass,
I slept for 10 hours and haven't had a chance to test the code (which obviously was a small piece of a much larger script). I assume you are right and that the problem was elsewhere. I will see what happens and report back if still having problems.

Update: Yep. I wasn't bothering to verify I was fetching the URL I thought I was. Instead of http://dl.opensubtitles.org/en/download/file/1953419460, I was grabbing http://dl.opensubtitles.org/en/download/file1953419460.