The 5 Most Unintentionally Hilarious Work Safety Videos
Long ago, some men in suits decided that rather than have actual people teach workplace safety, it was easier and cheaper to just force employees to watch a video.
And thus an industry was born, driven by countless filmmakers whose visions were too brutal, or brutally stupid, for Hollywood. Their creations are often bloody, horrifying and, for the most part, don't teach a fucking thing about workplace safety.
Let's take a moment to appreciate their baffling brand of genius.
Will You Be Here Tomorrow?
Warning: This work safety video is NSFW.
This video doesn't waste any time, and launches right into feeding your eyeballs nightmare fuel. In the first 10 seconds we're already exposed to a cheap 70s horror soundtrack and a roomful of people laughing at the carnage that is about to ensue.
No, you will not. And that is hilarious to us.
After a vague warning about "looking out for what could happen" we're treated to a melange of chaos that makes this workplace look like the Devil's own playground. Before the first minute is over several nameless workers meet gruesome fates: One topples off an improperly stabilized ladder and is impaled like a Die Hard villain, the next has a finger torn off and then a nail literally leaps off a board into a dude's face when he fails to hit it in exactly the right way. Truly, all inanimate objects you encounter in your work day are possessed with a dark, malicious intent.
You explain this better.
While you're still wrapping your mind around that, at 3:20 a man, angered at a lack of overtime, literally crams his hand into a piece of machinery no less than three times, causing his fingers to finally come off in a geyser of blood and screams.
Note that at no point during this parade of dismemberment is any kind of safety procedure mentioned at all. We're left only with the baffling lesson that workplace accidents are equal parts horrifying and hilarious.
It's at this point the producers felt we needed a break, and we're treated to a montage of workers displaying harrowing facial hair. They all repeat some variation of "We're a team. We need to work together, pay attention and be safe."
Well... OK. We'd expect this is where they give us some helpful tips on how to avoid a horrible maiming or death, but instead we see one last unnamed worker literally Michael Bay the whole fucking plant, killing everyone. In the end, their inspirational words were but a futile whimper in the face of the horrific minefield that is the modern workplace.
The final message is clear: Like in the Final Destination franchise, Death will find you, no matter what.
Surviving Edged Weapons
Police have the unenviable job requirement of frequently dealing with deranged people whose mental faculties are fine-tuned by a lifetime consuming gasoline fumes and crystal meth. To make things worse, these people often have or believe themselves to have proficient skill in bladed weapons of all shapes and sizes.
Attempting to explain the motivation of these individuals is part of the message of Surviving Edged Weapons, a training video that seems to be half charming Canadian accents, half Filipino martial arts and 100 percent awesome. Some highlights:
The video is notable for featuring an appearance by the single most Canadian man who ever lived. With hockey hair and matching accent, he pulls a blade on a cop, then quickly drops it when the officer reveals he has a much less dangerous telescoping stick in his arsenal.
Also a cop gets stabbed in the face.
The video goes on to feature a narrator with a wealth of helpful insights, like the part where he explains that the razor-wielding hobo encrusted in his own filth is trying to say, "Don't invade my space or I will attack you." Maybe we have a different set of communication skills than the target audience, but we think the hobo was making his point perfectly clear by hollering, "Get out of my house!" and WAVING AROUND A FUCKING RAZOR.
"My personal space is important for my self-esteem!"
Likewise, later we learn that an Asian man wind-sprinting down the road, screaming and brandishing a machete represents "imminent danger."
Thanks, Narrator!
While the video's efficacy as a police training tool may be questionable, it certainly represents the finest in low budget knife fights you're apt to see outside of anything featuring Steven Seagal. Hopefully the director of this piece is still out there, maybe in Hollywood, maybe making direct-to-DVD action movies. And hopefully they all star that Canadian guy up there.
You and Office Safety
The company who continues to issue this video decades after it was produced insists its message is timeless (mainly because they want your boss to pay $250 for it). We supposed that's true, in the sense that this video offers one thing that never gets old and that's a hell of a lot of coffee bukkake, for those of you that are into that.
The Drew Carey clone here suffers from many indignities at the hands of his clumsy co-workers; getting hit with a door so hard it smashes his glasses, hitting his head on various surfaces, taking jabs in the face with an umbrella, having his spine adjusted by a heavy drawer (to a jaunty xylophone run) and even getting stabbed in the chest by a freshly-sharpened pencil.
That's fairly timeless, right?
At least it is until about a minute in, when we get the line, "No one expects an accident... least of all this pretty little thing" and see the requisite female employee in a skirt who apparently doesn't know her ass from grape jelly. From that point on, all the women in this video are chatty, clumsy, birdlike creatures tottering about on high heels, completely oblivious to the world around them.
Yeah, it's fairly clear what the real message is here. Many of the situations presented in this video as slapstick seem like they'd wind up in a sexual harassment video today. Though we suppose it's possible you'd trip at work and have to break your fall by nearly dry humping a co-worker through a filing cabinet while you cover her mouth to prevent screaming.
Wait, what exactly is happening here?
Is it sexist? Sure, but it was a different time, right? A time when, as the video demonstrates, you could count on nine accidents out of 10 being the result of ditzy broads bumbling their way through a man's world, their very boobs radiating waves of chaos that will bring the American economy to its knees if not restrained.
Shake Hands With Danger
So it's the 60s, and you're an aspiring horror director. You've just made your first B-movie, 1962's Carnival Of Souls (now a cult favorite).
Also, you're this guy:
That's Herk Harvey, and he probably thought he was destined for great things after he shot his low-budget horror opus. Fast forward a decade or so, and he's making Shake Hands with Danger, a 25-minute feature intended to scare construction workers into not climbing behind the wheel of their Caterpillar while stoned.
You know you're in for awesome in this one as soon as the ultra-70s country-guitar riff blasts in to announce our narrator, Three-Fingered Joe. He used to laugh at safety, until a journey through the dark corridors of horror drove all mirth from his soul.
While the movie presents a number of what may be commonplace construction site dangers, when they acknowledge at about 8:30 that most people come to work hungover every so often, you begin to see where the real dangers lie.
From the first apparent fatality featuring a man falling off a boom, to our good buddy Glenn having some kind of metal shrapnel hurtle into his chest...
...to a guy getting his arm ripped off thanks to a combination of stupidity and a wandering insect...
...you can see how Harvey merged his terrifying Eli Rothian vision with the timeless message of workplace safety. The result is like a Tales from the Crypt movie sponsored entirely by a backhoe manufacturer.
It Only Takes a Second
This video has one message, and one message only: It doesn't matter where you work, it doesn't matter what you do, in the blink of an eye, one day, your asshole is going to be ripped out through your face and it's probably your own stupid fault.
In what we can only assume was an attempt to market this video to as many employers as possible, It Only Takes A Second is composed of flash cuts of fuck-ups from all walks of life: warehouse, office work and even landscaping.
Curiously, some accidents don't seem so much work related as examples of malice outside the workplace, including at least one incident of what we assume is outright vehicular homicide.
Periodically amidst the bombardment of carnage come these strange, gauzy shots of emergency rooms, people in wheelchairs, and what no safety video is truly complete without, a beautiful young woman slowly turning around like she's in a Whitesnake video only to reveal she has an eye patch. She lost a fucking eye!
We feel the need to point out once again that at no point in this video are any actual, um, safety procedures discussed. Just scene after scene of people tripping over boxes, cars crashing, machinery crushing people like soda cans and then wispy shots of painful and heart-wrenching rehabilitation.
In the final shot where an exasperated mother behind the wheel turns to her bastard rowdy child a moment before her car erupts into a gigantic fireball, the lesson may be either children are assholes and should be abolished, or that you shouldn't travel with a load of TNT under your hood:
We suppose the ideas is that if you haven't turned from the video and flipped off your boss at this point, you get the job. Now be safe!
To see Ralf discuss more too painful to watch videos, check out Maybe The Dorkiest Thing You'll See All Day.
For more disturbingly hilarious videos, check out 5 Ridiculous (Safe for Work) Fetishes and 10 Awesome Ads (For Traumatizing Children).
And stop by Cracked.com's Top Picks and we'll teach you how to make your work station safe-for-booby-viewing.
