PHP: "file_get_contents()" returning NULL from content-verified URL

I'm betting that it'll end up being something simple ... but I can use a hand in spotting it.

Problem:
When I try to get the contents of a specific local URL via file_get_contents(), it comes back as an empty string '' (length=0).

What I've tried:

    $url = 'http://localhost/bbq/index.php/company/get/id/2131/return/json';
    $results = file_get_contents($url);
    echo'<pre>Results:<br />',var_export($results),'</pre>';

When directly visiting http://localhost/bbq/index.php/company/get/id/2131/return/json, everything echos beautifully: {"id":"2131","value":"Acme Anvil Corp."}

To check myself, I tried it with $url = 'http://www.google.com', and it worked as expected so then I tried a separate Local uri, http://localhost/?phpinfo=1, and it also worked just fine.

Question:
What am I missing???

[ADDITIONAL INFO]
allow_url_fopen is ON

I may have just found something.
As a safety measure in CODEIGNITER projects, the first line of the controller script has:

    if ( !defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');

Commenting it out didn't provide any improvements, but I thought it may be worth mentioning nonetheless.

Also, here's a dump of the HTTP Response Header. Maybe someone can see something in there. It all seems pretty straight forward to me, but I don't really know what I should be looking for.

array (size=13)
  0 => string 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK' (length=15)
  1 => string 'Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2012 19:58:47 GMT' (length=35)
  2 => string 'Server: Apache/2.4.2 (Win64) PHP/5.4.3' (length=38)
  3 => string 'X-Powered-By: PHP/5.4.3' (length=23)
  4 => string 'Set-Cookie: csrf_cookie