In Back to the Outback, the wildlife park Chaz works at lets people walk right up to "cute" animals, has nothing to stop people from falling into the crocodile pool other than a waist-high wall that children can easily climb over, and during his show where he shows off "the deadliest creatures on the planet", there are no barriers between him and the guests, and he even brings said deadly animals right up to the people in the front row, and allows what he believes to be a frantic, angry crocodile to run around near them. If Jackie wasn’t actually a really nice crocodile, or even if they had a different crocodile in the pool, Chazzie would have been croc food.
Bolt: The set of the in-universe show has some egregious safety violations. For one thing, there is apparently no fire suppression system and the set is highly flammable — when some torches are accidentally knocked over, it goes up like flypaper. This is on the set of a modern TV show... one imagines the unions for actors and stagehands would have been sending the studio some very strong letters afterwards.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2: Apparently nobody considered including any rails in Live Corp's new factory. Especially egregious considering that they are present within Live Corp's headquarters shown earlier in the film.
A bell that's heavy enough to crush someone to death should not be suspended by a single rope that can go slack with one accidental pull of a lever.
The Land of the Dead notably lacks a large number of safety systems on the heavy machinery within it. Justified, as everyone is already dead and are only prone to Amusing Injuries in this respect.
The Emperor's New Groove: The lever that flips you into Yzma's secret lab is right next to a lever opening a trapdoor to a crocodile pit. Lampshaded when Yzma's henchman Kronk pulls the wrong lever. Returning from her trip to the pool, the alligator-encumbered Yzma says, "Why do we evenhavethat lever?" (Kuzco would also like to know.) This is also played with in the TV series. Every time Yzma goes to her lair in the school, she orders "Pull the lever, Kronk!", followed by something DIFFERENT happening to her each episode. Even Kuzco does this in a secret bunker that he had hidden in the jungle for some reason.
Jonny Quest vs. the Cyber Insects: Zin's asteroid base is pretty much your standard supervillain death trap with high, suspended walkways without handrails suspended over hundred foot chasms. He does have handrails over his ethanol vats, but no lids on them.
My Little Pony: A New Generation: The CanterLogic factory's demonstration of anti-unicorn and anti-pegasus devices is "fully automated" and cannot be shut down even when it places a pony in danger. The factory floor itself is no better, especially once Sprout takes over, with massive chunks of machinery swinging from cranes, hitting other equipment, and missing the workers by inches.
The Steam Engines of Oz: The machine Victoria is working on at the start of the movie is one that obviously requires regular maintenance (after all, that's her job), so surely it would have made more sense to design it so that all parts that will need replacing can be accessed without the mechanic having to climb up the outside of the machine with no ladders or safety lines, and over the top of exposed whirring gears? Or, at least, have some way of turning the machine off while it is worked on?
The Super Mario Bros. Movie features Floating Platforms and brick blocks without rails in the Mushroom Kingdom, much like in the games, and Toads are expected to do a lot of traveling on them. Mario, understandably, gets nervous traveling with the platforms.
WALL•E: While the Buy n Large mega-corporation would be pulverized by the EPA if the company didn't basically own the ENTIRE planet (not even counting the literal mountains of trash, their plan to take care of the garbage is to just incinerate it all), they do have very good safety standards. The Axiom's trash compactor gives ample warning before it sends the garbage into space (even though no human could realistically get down there, and the doors close before the trash is sent off), the garbage chutes have covers over them, there is a ton of safety features on the escape pod (seat restraints, flares, flotation devices, fire extinguisher), and there are manual emergency door overrides that for once actually work.
One thing about the trash ejection that does play it straight: There's no failsafe in place in case the inner doors are blocked from closing completely before the outer doors open. Even worse, in this case the outer doors appear to be stuck on. There is an emergency close button, but the WALL-As have to press it manually. The only reason WALL-E and EVE didn't get sucked out into space was because M-O arrived at just the right time. Oddly enough, in the deleted scene where WALL-E was rescuing EVE rather than vice versa, such a failsafe did seem to exist, as once M-O is trapped in the door WALL-E and EVE aren't sucked out.
BnL really has the opposite problem: babying humans for so long that they've become, well, giant babies. The corporation has taken great pains to create robots for every task, keeping the humans from doing anything that resembles either work or risk, but also preventing them from accomplishing anything.
Live-Action
A study conducted in 2014 discovered that the creation of the chief antagonist in 7 of the top 25 highest-grossing superhero films could have been prevented had said antagonists' employers followed basic workplace safety regulations.
In Alien, the Nostromo has obnoxious strobe lights and steam jets that have no apparent purpose other than to make life difficult once the self-destruct protocol is initiated.
Confounding the problem, the ship is woefully understaffed, so much that a single case of food poisoning would have caused them all to die, even without the eponymous alien. Oddly Small Organization anyone?
The Nostromo is a hauling ship, and its crew are glorified space truckers. It makes economic sense to put just a bare minimal crew to comply with whatever standards there may be for space travel, and if something actually did go wrong, the AI could probably bring the ship home all by itself (while not being allowed to do so during "normal operation").
LV-426 in Aliens does have handrails, but they are only thigh-high, and result in at least one Colonial Marine falling over and plummeting through the floors of an atmosphere processor.
Note that Aliens was filmed in Acton Lane Power Station, inviting speculation as to the OSHA compliance of the real life location.
There is a huge unshielded rotor at the end of the Air-Vent Passageway that swallows Newt.
Alien³ has a man cleaning a tunnel right next to a fan that has no protective venting whatsoever.
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. The power goes out and it seems not a single building in town has emergency lights except the hospital, where they flicker uncontrollably.
The power center of the OsCorp building in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has high-voltage cables accessed by narrow walkways suspended above huge uncovered water tanks full of giant electric eels. Then there's the stroke of genius that (almost) everyone should be allowed to go home for the night instead of keeping adequate night shift staff at an electricity production facility which is indeed active 24 hours a day.
The Arrival: Charlie Sheen pushes a disguised alien out of an elevator, falling to his doom. The aliens have interstellar travel, secretly build a vast network of Global warming-inducing terraforming plants on Earth, yet their elevators are exposed, completely lacking in rails, or even walls for that matter. Go figure.
Batman (1989): Jack Napier gets dropped into a giant bubbling vat full of... something to turn him into The Joker. Justified: Jack turns on a bunch of the machines and makes them run at unsafe levels to create a diversion for the cops. The vat full of green acid? You can see it being filled in the background of several shots, as a result of these actions. Laser-Guided Karma indeed.
In Bird on a Wire, the final battle between Rick Jarmin and the bad guys takes place in the zoo that is filled to the brim with nasty security breaches / insane design. Let's count all the ways things can go wrong: 1) Mixing leopards and tigers in the same space. 2) putting chimpanzees and baboons in the same habitat then 3) allowing aforementioned leopards and tigers access to the monkey habitat 4) also, crocodiles and snakes and 5) rickety bridge/ledge that connects with 6) unsecured artificial waterfall that fills artificial lake filled with 7) wholly natural piranhas! And that's not mentioning lack of any security from "behind the scenes", which allows our hero access to the cages of all those animals without any problems.
Burning Ambition: One of the film's numerous fight scenes is set in an amusement park's tent, labelled "Authentic Chinese Weapons Exhibition", where swords, spears, poleaxes, rope darts and flails are displayed in public, without any safety measures preventing them from being removed. Naturally the protagonist and an Elite Mook ends up crashing into said exhibition, grabbing weapons, and fighting each other to the death on the spot, causing horrified visitors to flee the tent in panic.
Leaving aside the corrupt upper management, the WALDO facility in The Chain Reaction is incredibly poorly designed and maintained, thus enabling the radiation leak that sets the plot in motion.
The Good Guy Doll factory in Child's Play 2 apparently has highly inaccessible (and locked) exits, blocked off by conveyor belts and doll assembling machines.
Child's Play 3 has the haunted house carnival ride, which has a real swinging blade capable of slicing flesh (Well, doll flesh, anyway) clean off and a giant, deadly, uncovered ventilation fan, Apparently worker safety unions don't exist in the Child's Play universe.
In City of Ember, the generator of Ember has catwalks and stairs going above and alongside heavy, dangerous, steam-emitting machinery of all kinds. And the official, government-approved method to escape the city involves hundreds to thousands of people riding a ridiculously dangerous water toboggan on tiny wooden boats that are intended to pass above large water turbines. Note that it's not described as being nearly so dangerous in the book; most likely this was done for dramatic effect.
Dancin': It's On!: The hotel featured in the film has people constantly dancing and breaking out in risky circus performances in places like the kitchen or a crowded lobby, and it's treated as an appeal rather than a safety risk.
The second half of Dark Star centers around a talking bomb that gets jammed in the launch bay and refuses to disarm itself while still attached to the ship. The whole problem could have been avoided if the launching procedure had been changed to launch the bomb, confirm the bomb is clear, then tell the bomb to start the detonation countdown. Or included an abort code in the programming in case of emergencies just like this. note There are hints the parent company was not too concerned about safety.
In Daylight, hotshot EMS Chief Kit Latura rescues people from a blocked and weakened underwater "Hudson Tunnel" (standing in for the Lincoln Tunnel) in New York City. The ventilation facilities for said tunnels was something that has just flown under the radar of the OSHA whale for sure. In real life, the ventilation system costs several hundred million dollars, consume several dozen kilowatts of power, and in the event of an emergency the fans will run at 105% capacity until failure. And trucks like that aren't allowed to go through any tunnels for exactly this reason. Even ones that just catch on fire like they would in real life instead of producing an Independence Day-sized fireball. And ones where the explodium barrels are actually secured.
In Dredd, Peach Trees has a skateboard park. On the outside of the seventieth floor.
Elysium: Max's foreman telling people to do really dangerous things, like go inside a radiation chamber to fix a door jam, or get replaced. Worse still is the fact that said radiation chamber has no emergency shutoff button, not even from the outside. Justified in that OSHA probably doesn't even exist anymore. One particular thing to note is that the radiation chamber, once active, does have sensors to detect if something is in there that shouldn't be. It doesn't turn the chamber off, of course, more like "BTW, you're cooking some dude." The whole thing is made pretty ironic due to the intercom in the factory constantly blaring on about working safe.
Enemy Mine features a mining ship with little to no safety features in sight, resulting in plentiful deaths and mutilations. Possibly justified in that it belongs to illegal strip-miners who employ illegal slave labor, and probably couldn't be arsed with caring about legal safety regulations.
In Event Horizon, the ship shows The Medic a vision of her son back home to lure her into the bowels of the mechanism. After chasing it up several levels on a ladder, she finally reaches out her hand to take his... and plummets several stories into the engine room, off a darkened ledge with no handrail. To be fair, it may have had a handrail before the ship went to hell and back.
In Ex Machina, all the doors of Nathan's house can only be opened via keycards, and automatically lock during a power failure. So... What happens during a fire? Or any other kind of emergency situation?
The Final Destination films might as well have been called No OSHA Compliance: The Movies, considering how many gruesomely-fatal accidents result from a single trivial mechanical glitch. Then again, said glitches are occuring due to supernatural influence by The Grim Reaper, who presumably has a lot of experience in setting said glitches up.
Exaggerated in Forklift Driver Klaus. The factory that the title character works at isn't merely lax by EU standards — it's an absolute death trap waiting to spring! The ending takes the cake: the chainsaw man is accidentally impaled by Klaus' forklift, leading to Klaus' decapitation by chainsaw, the subsequent Deadfoot Leadfoot causing another impalement, the chainsaw guy's arm being ripped off, and the chainsaw death of a man who had earlier been cut in half and somehow survived until now! And because there were so many accidents earlier in the day, the alarm bell broke and fell off the wall (hitting someone in the process), meaning that the ambulance can't help anyone. Even weirder is that Klaus passed his forklift safety exam, and the film begins with him earning his license. Strictly speaking, of course, the workplace does conform to all safety standards (with the possible exception of that alarm bell), but the employees keep ignoring the safety rules, and the film shows the disastrous consequences.
The Fly (1986): Seth Brundle's home doubles as his laboratory, where he works to complete his teleporter. Such a groundbreaking and risky experiment, ideally, should have been conducted in a cleanroom free of any potential contaminants. His fusion with a fly while teleporting was just waiting to happen.
Justified in Forbidden Planet. The railings of the Krell Underground City are below knee height despite having ventilation shafts thousands of levels high. However the shape of the doors imply the Krell were a lot shorter and squatter than a human being. They mustn't have had good hearing either given the never-ending rumble of the self-maintaining city.
In The Fugitive, Richard Kimble, Marshall Gerard, and Dr. Charles Nichols all chase each other in a laundry room full of scalding hot pipes and a huge I beam on a chain for someone to get hit in the head with.
Lampshaded by Galaxy Quest in a number of places, most notably when The Captain and the Bridge Bunny need to pass through a part of the ship that is essentially a Death Course for no reason other than that it was used as one in the original series the ship was based on. On seeing what they had to do to get past, the Bridge Bunny (Sigourney Weaver playing actress Gwen De Marco playing Lt. Tawny Madison) exclaims, "Well, forget it! I'm not doing it! This episode was badly written!"
The Green Hornet Serials: In a less extreme (if still fatal) example, everyone at the Grimbolt Steel Mill seems to consider a worker passing out and falling into a vat of molten steel as just one of those things that happens when you're working there.
The higher-ups of Ellingson Mineral Company in Hackers, apparently, think that an oil tanker has no need for manual controls, because computers are much safer. So what happens when a virus gets into the mainframe and is propagated to the tanker computers?
The Plague: The little boat flipped over.
Interestingly, it's one of those higher-ups who suggests putting the ballast under manual control before being condescendingly told by The Plague that there's no such thing anymore. Obviously, he wasn't the one who made the decision to go for all-automatic.
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: Wayne Szalinski has his shrink ray facing the attic door, and keeps the door unlocked even after it's established that the machine doesn't work yet (it blows things up). While there are minors in the house.
In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the alternate mine track turns into a dangerously fast roller coaster track that is elevated over sharp rocks, has hairpin turns and sudden drops, and at one point runs high above a magma chamber. The various junctions and equipment strewn through the path indicate that miners (children, at that) are meant to work there. Another one possibly justified because the owners were evil: the kids were slave labor. Amusingly, a boarded-up track has a "DANGER" sign across it. You don't say!
Lampshaded in I, Robot when Spooner, trying to get to the brain of the villain computer, complains about the stupidity of a design involving narrow catwalks suspended over a 100+ -story shaft. Especially when trying to cross while being attacked by hundreds of killer robots. Presumably US Robotics designed it to be pretty and/or serviced by robots, because it's not like that kind of arrogance would be out of character for them.
Spooner: This is poor building planning.
There's also the deadly anti-VIKI nanomachines. Which are kept in a forcefield that instantly destroys the parts of any standard robot that touches it. There is no barrier around the container. Just think what it would do to any human in the room who, say, tripped.
Most James Bond films contain examples of this, though it may often be justified as being part of the (super)villain's secret lair, and thus not always built with safety in mind by set designer Ken Adam and his successors.
Dr. No has a completely unshielded nuclear reactor, complete with a coolant pool with barely a railing between it and the control stations. An Air-Vent Passageway even opens into the room.
Thunderball: The health spa at the beginning has a back-stretching machine. The nurse straps Bond into it, turns it on and leaves the room. Somebody else comes in and turns the machine to maximum setting, which nearly kills Bond. There's no reason why that machine should be capable of doing that. (The same could be said for the steam bath Bond tries to parboil Lippe with in return.)
In The Man with the Golden Gun, Scaramanga's laser has a maintenance access area mere inches from the path of the beam, which can be switched on if someone so much as bumps the control panel. Additionally, his complex's power source involves uncovered vats of cryogenic liquid, which naturally have catwalks above them from which it is easy to fall. Did we mention the whole thing explodes if something (like, say, a body) causes the temperature to rise?
The Venice lab facility. It involves the handling of a nerve agent that kills in under a minute should any of it leak, and somehow does not require the lab workers to wear biohazard gear in the event of an accidental spill. There are safety precautions to ensure that the gas doesn't spread outside the room where the leak occurred, but nothing to protect the people in that room. Sure enough, the vials that Bond left in there break, the two scientists die and now Bond knows a bit more about what Hugo Drax is up to.
Bond turns off the artificial gravity of the Big Bad's space station with the flip of a switch. This one might be justified, as the artificial gravity is created by rotating the station, and an easily-accessible emergency stop control might be used to prevent structural damage.
In the same film, Drax's astronaut training center has a centrifuge that for some reason can produce far more simulated Gs than any human could survive. There is a kill switch in the centrifuge car, but if that doesn't work (or if someone simply unscrews the wire to it), the person inside the centrifuge is dead meat.
There is also a conference room built in the exhaust pit below a Moonraker shuttle. There doesn't seem to be any reason to build a conference room there, other than to have a cool scene where the table and chairs retract into the floor to protect them (or perhaps Drax had planned a needlessly elaborateBoard to Death for some investors). Realistically you would still have to thoroughly hose down the whole place to remove all the toxic unburnt rocket fuel before using it again.
In Licence to Kill, Bond is trapped on a conveyor belt leading to a pair of toothed rollers. There is an emergency stop switch... on the far end of the conveyor. Then again, this may have been a deliberate Death Trap.
One of the villains suffers death by Explosive Decompression when a single hose on his hyperbaric chamber is cut by the Big Bad.
In Goldeneye, the Big Bad keeps drums of aircraft fuel and vats of cryogenic liquid in the same room as the workstations from which he controls everything.
In Tomorrow Never Dies, a number of mooks end up crushed by newspaper printing presses or falling off of catwalks over them. Later, we see the Big Bad's ship, in which both the Sea Drill and a nuclear missile are stored and launched in the same space as the crew's workstations. There doesn't even appear to be any means of venting exhaust from the rocket motor for the cruise missile.
Die Another Day: The diamond lasers at the Big Bad's ice fortress apparently have some sort of Party Mode, where pressing a button will cause them all to turn on and start spinning around wildly.
Quantum of Solace: If you're going to run your hotel on hydrogen fuel cells, you might want to protect all that explosive hydrogen with more than a chain-link fence. Then again, the hotel was still under construction. How, exactly, does one recharge said fuel cells? By separating the hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms in plain, ordinary water, which is, thanks to Quantum's activities, in very short supply in Bolivia. Karmic Death never tasted so good.
Spectre: 007 blows up a gas canister in Blofeld's Moroccan base in the middle of a gunfight. As he and the Bond Girl bail out, the entire lair explodes in smithereens because of a chain reaction that was apparently caused by shooting the gas valve. It's probably the most fragile Supervillain Lair in the Bond franchise, and Bond nonchalantly looks at the base exploding, as he's been used to trashing and destroying villain bases.
Jurassic Park: In both the novel and the film, the park is not ready to be opened to the general public. In the novel, Hammond is simply too arrogant to really care; in the film, he's too optimistic. Several of these were patched by the time Jurassic World opens up.
In the book, most of these things can be explained by the fact that Hammond is basically a scam artist who tricked people into investing. Despite his claims to the contrary, a lot of the park has been built cheaply, or simply hasn't been finished. Also, the disastrous lack of staff can be explained by his desire to keep the park a secret until it opened. A necessity considering that he is playing fast and loose with the law.
The entire park relies exclusively on electric fences to keep the dinosaurs penned in. Did Hammond honestly not consider the possibility that something as prone to temporary failures as electricity would not be enough on its own? Hammond seriously intends to operate a family-oriented theme park that will always be just one power outage away from disaster.
You would also think Hammond would keep a well-armed security force on standby in case any dinosaurs escape, but nope. The park as depicted in the film appears to have no full time security guards; the novel does have some but it's not stated that they're armed with firearms or otherwise. The game warden Muldoon does seem to have access to pistols and some longarms in his armoury, and has his animal control team arm up for whenever a Velociraptor is moved in or out of a cage. In the novel, Hammond even pitches ten kinds of fits about having any weapon on the island at all that can injure or kill the dinosaurs! Apparently, tranquilizers are sufficient. It took the deaths of three workers when a raptor escaped and Muldoon threatening to inform the press before Hammond even allowed him to obtain two LAW rocket launchers in case of future breakouts.
"I told you we needed locking mechanisms on the vehicle doors!" Hammond's much-vaunted automated tour cars can be opened while in motion, and the vehicle does not stop at any point. It could make it incredibly easy for a guest to get lost in the park (with all the environmental hazards this implies), or get run over by another tour car.
There are poisonous — but very pretty! — plants everywhere throughout the facilities, from the Visitor Center landscaping (within reach of guests, including children) to the animal enclosures, where the park's prized dinosaurs could consume them. In the novel, Ellie even lampshades the stupidity of having an incredibly poisonous plant around the pool. This plant is so toxic you can get sick just from touching it.
Electric fences are within quick and easy reach of anyone, from park guests to park personnel. If a park guest gets out of the tour car (see above) there's nothing stopping them from reaching out and grabbing a fence line. Bear in mind that these fences are sufficiently electrified to prevent enormous dinosaurs from breaking through. Guess what happens if a much smaller animal, like a human, touches them. Also, there are security doors to the animal paddocks which have electrified locks on the outside of the door, so anyone wandering the service roads can stumble into them.
And those electronic locks? Can't be operated by hand. One of the most tense scenes near the end of the film becomes ludicrous when the Fridge Logic hits you that a manual deadbolt could have solved the entire "boot up the system/keep out the raptor" dilemma much more easily. Lampshaded by "Weird Al" Yankovic on the Rifftrax commentary:
"Y'know, my bathroom door has a button on the knob. Ya press it, AND IT LOCKS."
Raptors are loaded into (and presumably, unloaded from) their exclusive pen by means of a large opening at the end of the structure. A cage is then pushed into place so that it opens into this door, spilling its content into the raptor pen. The problems with this are numerous: a) there is no mechanism locking the cage into place and fix it to the door; b) there's no counterweight on the other side of the cage; c) the cage is light enough to be pushed into place by hand; d) the cage door has to be raised by a park worker standing on top of the cage and lifting the door with his own strength and balance — even though the pen is already equipped with a crane for lowering food into it.
No independent, battery-powered emergency lighting anywhere. Not even in the service sheds with the deep, steep staircases leading down into pitch darkness. And we don't mean "flashlights," we mean basic emergency floodlights on walls or ceilings, particularly in vital areas like the control rooms and generator rooms.
According to the book, the backup generator did not have sufficient power to run the fences on the animal paddocks. Which means that losing main power for more than a few minutes (even for things like planned maintenance) brings a non-trivial risk of the animals breaking out. And the mechanisms used to make sure that the controllers are aware that the system is on backup power (and that the backup generator was running out of fuel) were clearly inadequate, as nobody remembered any of this until the backup generator shut down.
Once again, a lackluster security force. Although a special capture unit is sent to hunt down the Indominus rex, the park itself is completely unguarded, there are no proper evacuation procedures, immediate access to shelters, or even trained personnel to assist visitors in emergency situations.
Guests can easily override controls of the "hamster ball" tour vehicles and venture into areas not meant to be visited. Even a supermarket's shopping cart can be designed with active locks to prevent it from rolling out of its designated range, but these hamster balls can go wherever they please.
The Mosasaurus pool, like any aquatic animal show, has stadium seating. Presumably, the dino can't get out of the pool, but the climax of the movie reveals it can leap out to ground-level (that is, over the top of the seats) whenever it pleases. That's a lot of crushed and/or eaten guests if it ever gets peckish during a show! It's possible that the security systems of the park, when they're operational, could project some kind of invisible, active denial field to dissuade the beast from leaping anywhere but vertically, but this isn't confirmed in the movie.
The Indominus is kept in a pen with severely deficient security cameras — it can easily hide from them at its leisure — and security is staffed by a single, inattentive, out-of-shape guard. The pen itself, while admittedly meant to be temporary, has neither the moat of its predecessors nor a double-door access corridor like the current raptor pen does, so the Indominus only needs to slip out one door to break free.
The Control Room isn't better in this regard. The Paddock 9 for the T-Rex can easily be opened with the press of a button. No confirmations, no alerts, no authentications, nothing. Imagine if an operator pressed the button by accident.
In Let the Right One In, fourth-floor hospital windows can be opened — by the patient from the inside, no less! Shockingly, someone falls to his death. Even in 1980s Europe, windows in hospitals were permanently closed to prevent suicide, or sometimes people getting in.
Life as a House: George is told that the proximity of an unenclosed toilet to a kitchen in his shack is a health code violation, so George resolves to quickly fix the problem by grabbing an armoire, emptying it, cutting a hole at the bottom with his chainsaw, and then putting the armoire on top of the toilet.
The spaceship has some panel on the wall that explodes violently when shot ONCE (despite bullets being shot all over the place in other scenes with no similar explosions).
Hock locks himself and Emily in a room and shoots the door lock to lock them inside, somehow he nicks a nitrogen line which slowly fills the room with nitrogen gas. It's a cryogenic prison, but WHY is there a nitrogen gas tube running through the wall of a cell in a way it can be easily punctured?
The Lord of the Rings movies never have handrails on their catwalks and bridges above bottomless pits. This is justified for Sauron's forces, given that the dark lord probably doesn't place much of a worth on a single orc's life, and Sauron himself couldn't be killed by heat or a fall, but that doesn't explain Saruman's ramshackle construction sites. The prevailing lack of handrails on high bridges and ledges makes even less sense in Rivendell, Moria, and Erebor.
In The Hobbit, Erebor had some pretty questionable mining practices. The crowning glory has to be the guy who thrusts a red-hot metal nugget into a pair of enormous hammers right above his head. With his hand.
And the Dwarven Steel Mill at the basement of Erebor would be closed within seconds should OSHA get a hint. The blast furnaces (which emit carbon monoxide and Hellfire in Real Life) are located indoors and the runners for hot metal are completely open, with no protective measures for the workers. It generally isn't a good idea to surf on a wheelbarrow on a stream of glowing hot metal.
There is, however, a very practical reason for all those narrow rail-less bridges across bottomless pits — they force any attacking army into an easily-defended chokepoint which has no cover whatsoever from arrow fire.
The behind-the-scenes features of The Hobbit reveal that the steps going up to Thranduil's throne had a handrail — that was painted in greenscreen color, so that the special effects could make the set look less safe than it was in real life.
Averted early in The Incredible Hulk (2008) when Bruce Banner (working at a Brazilian soft drink bottling plant) cuts his finger and immediately has them shut down the production line so he can make sure his blood didn't taint any bottles. Unfortunately, Bruce stops when he sees a blood spatter on the conveyor belt, completely missing the droplet that landed on a bottle and kicks off the main plot by revealing his location to General Ross.
The Avengers (2012) plays it straight, however. The helicarrier may be a marvel of engineering, but one has to wonder what goes on behind the scenes at SHIELD, since no one seems to have realised that angling the flight deck out over one of the four rotors holding the carrier aloft is an astoundingly bad idea. Of course, we see later on in the film that it is possible to slow down the rotors, and the 'carrier can fly on just three. But that still means it's designed to hamper its own flight capability hampered every time it lands or launches a plane using that deck, and the uneven use would lead to nonuniform wear on the engines.note The comics' version of the 'carrier is often just as impractical. Or even more so.
Additionally, these are four immensely powerful rotors — powerful enough to, when activated, expel hundreds of thousands of liters of ocean water out the turbines in order to lift the Helicarrier out of the water, and then keep it aloft. They must gulp down an incalculable volume of air from directly above! Yet people standing on the landing strips can basically lean over the edge (which has no railing) to look at them, and risk getting sucked into them.note The carrier implicitly spends part of it's time disguised as a regular seagoing carrier, and those have no railings either. Also, judging from the way Steve and Bruce get ruffled, the air is somehow blowing away from the rotors, not toward them.
In Avengers: Infinity War, Etri's forge is ignited by a concentrated beam of solar energy so powerful it can melt just about anything. If the focusing lenses don't open, there's a set of levers that can be pulled to manually open them, which close the moment you stop pulling on them. In order to pull the levers, you must stand directly in the path of the beam the lens creates. Maybe it's some sort of legacy feature they used without the danger before the focusing beam was made?
Manila in the Claws of Light: The construction workers work in very unsafe conditions and their foremen take a large cut of their wages. It's unsurprising when an accident from poor infrastructure causes the death of one of them. To make it worse, the bosses just pick up the body and tell everyone to keep working as if nothing had happened.
The title city's underground machine rooms in Metropolis fit this trope. Unlike most examples, the fact that the people in charge of the city didn't care about the safety of the workers is a major plot point. In one scene, the main character watches as exhausted workers keep making adjustments to a machine to make sure it doesn't overheat. One of the workers collapses. Within seconds the machine overheats and explodes, blasting the poor employees across the room. The main character then imagines that the machine is a pagan god devouring human sacrifices.
The cult Soviet sci-fi two-parter Moscow — Cassiopeia has the relativistic starship ZARYa crewed by teens due to the length of the journey. The safety features appear to be more or less ok (even the walls on The Bridge are padded in case of sudden acceleration), except for the garbage disposal system. It's a hatch that swivels in the middle as soon as the Big Red Button is pushed, putting the garbage into a large pyramid-shaped transparent container and immediately ejects it into space. It's no surprise when a crewmember (albeit one who sneaks aboard) accidentally gets dumped into space and has to be recovered by The Captain going EVA before Proxima Centauri toasts him.
In Murders in the Zoo, the zoo has an unenclosed bridge on a public path that crosses over the crocodile pool. Unsurprisingly, Eric Gorman pushes his wife to her death off it.
The climactic battle in The One, starring Jet Li, takes place in just such a factory. A couple of isolated, detonated explosives, and suddenly the entire building is a shower of sparks and flame. But at least the walkways can handle guys leaping twenty feet into the air before landing on them.
In The Phantom Planet, two plates that produce enough gravitational force to disintegrate, which are used in a death duel built around the participants attempting to push each other onto the plates, are simply left activated without anything resembling a warning sign or safety rail. This is especially stupid because the plates can be turned off; they just apparently don't bother to do so after they're used.
At the start of Rampage (2018), the evacuation pods for a space station can be remotely locked from Earth so that the execs on the ground can force employees to follow a few more orders before letting them flee in the event of a disaster, which is why the dangerous mutagen that turned three random animals into Kaiju didn't all burn up in re-entry. Guaranteeing employees the ability to evacuate the workplace in the event of a life-threatening emergency was one of the first workplace safety laws passed in the modern age.
In the beginning of Reign of Fire, it's just the employees for a change who display horrible disregard for safety precautions: A child around ten years old is allowed to enter a tunnel excavation site without adult escort or wearing a hard hat just because he is the son of the forewoman (who doesn't care about this either). Meanwhile, one of the workers has hit an underground cavern and gets the bright idea to send the kid in to check out this completely unknown territory. Sure, he decided to do that on his own and was a Jerkass anyway, but that's just idiotic.
Robin Hood (2018): It's not clear what they are mining in Nottingham (although it is implied to be iron, which raises its own issues), but the process requires sending blasts of fire skywards at regular intervals. Lack of even the most rudimentary safety measures can probably be Handwaved as it being the middle ages.
Justified in Runaway, as the reason for the lack of safety rails on a construction site is that only robots work up there. Knowing that the hero suffers from vertigo, it's where the Big Bad chooses to make a hostage exchange. Played straight, though, when the button to reset the elevator turns out to be underneath it, so Ramsey has to climb under the lift platform while hundreds of stories up.
In Serenity, Mal needs to access a machine that's "a little hard to get to"; it's on a platform in the center of a deep shaft filled with moving and grinding machinery. The bridge controls are for some reason only on the platform itself,note the guy who owned the place is a master hacker, so he may have had it configured for voice-print or suchlike and even extended, the bridge is narrow and has no railing (though at least the platform does). Justified in that the machine serves as his secret backup, the death course is just another layer of security.
Skyline gives us the trusty old "roof door that locks people out on the roof". Roof doors only lock on the inside of the building, to keep people from going out and jumping/falling off. They don't have locks on the outside so people don't get stuck out there.
In Slaxx, an important plot point is that Canadian Cotton Clothiers' ethical, eco-friendly branding is all a sham, and that they treat workers on the Indian plantations they get their cotton from just as badly as anyone else for the sake of profit. The villain is the ghost of a child laborer who died at one of those plantations thanks to the lack of safety precautions, who possessed a pair of jeans made with the cotton she picked and came to Canada to take her revenge on the employees and shoppers at one of CCC's boutiques.Libby, who went to work for CCC because she believed in its mission of corporate responsibility, is horrified and furious when she finds out.
In a fight scene from Snowpiercer, Minsoo throws a baddie off a catwalk and into an irresponsibly uncovered cog machinery.
In Spider-Man 3, the soon-to-be Sandman falls into a sand-filled open pit that is part of some lethal-looking experiment involving mysterious radiation. He had to climb a fence with a sign that said "DANGER DON'T COME IN HERE", which he either missed or ignored in desperation to escape the cops. Considering how many superheroes and villains owe their powers to messed-up experiments, one would think that engineers and scientists have learned to at least put a cover on the damn pit so that enterprising kids and random rabbits don't fall in. There is a fence and a warning sign, but apparently they never got the memo that the Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence only existed in video games. Even better, the scientists involved in the project did have the foresight to make sure the system warned them if foreign matter appeared inside the sand pit, but then decided that it wasn't worth worrying about. One of them decided that it was probably a bird that would fly off when they started, and told the other one to continue with the experiment.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture: A transporter which is on the fritz and not safe for use will apparently still accept incoming transports from another location, rather than letting the sender do all the work. Given they were working on a console which went haywire due to the transport, this could be chalked up to extraordinarily bad timing, though it still raises the question as to why no one told the sender that transport wasn't safe. Kirk, after all, was beamed into an orbiting station and then flown over. Also, beginning in this movie and in the rest of the TOS movies, engineers now had radiation suits.
In the engine room of the USS Enterprise. Apparently, there's some sort of engine chamber containing radioactive materials, and the only way to enter this chamber is through a revolving door. When Spock goes in to make repairs (with no radiation suit!) he cannot be retrieved for medical treatment because the entire compartment would be flooded with radiation. Justified by the massive battle damage that had caused the leak in the first place. Word of God is that Starfleet had that design there because they figured any ship that damaged was as good as dead anyway.
In the science lab Regula One, some of the workstations are on narrow platforms with no railings that are at least ten feet from the floor level.
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country has this as a plot point. Praxis exploded because the Klingons have No OSHA Compliance. Their mining operations were so extensive and poorly regulated that the whole planet was a powder keg waiting for a spark.
Star Trek: Generations has the stellar cartography lab aboard the Enterprise-D on a small circular platform in a large room, connected by a narrow walkway without handrails.
Some of the hull windows were said to be force fields, but this was in an enclosed maintenance-type area seemingly only accessible via Jeffries tubes and was normally covered by a retractable piece of hull anyway. As it is, force fields are used to seal hull breaches in any case in every series other than Enterprise.
There are some coolant pipes running up from the floor. They are filled with a flesh-melting gas capable of filling quite a good chunk of engineering. The plan involves puncturing one by shooting it. The backup plan has Data... karate-chopping it.
In Star Trek: Nemesis. The green shiny glowy thing channeling Thalaron radiation in Shinzon's ship is all open and exposed, allowing anybody to walk right up to it, hand phaser said glowy thing, and blow the ship all to hell.
Also, the chamber containing said device is immediately aft of the bridge, that apparently anyone can just walk into.
Romulan Space Mining Corp apparently picked up ship design plans from the Republic/Imperial Industrial Design Bureau, specifically Volume 3: "Platforms, No Safety Railings, and Bottomless Chasms". Given justification in the prequel comic, saying the Narada was warped by Borg tech. Also justified in that (1): it was a mining vessel, and probably used the chasms for storage and (2) they are Romulans. With enhanced strength and agility they can quite easily jump from platform to platform, and don't need to worry about falling.
Alternate-timeline Starfleet, on the other hand, makes this token effort to avert the trope in the transporter room: "Caution: Do not enter transporter while transport is in progress." Most people, when dealing with something as absurdly dangerous and volatile as a transporter (which, in terms of Starfleet accidents, are probably second after the infamous holodeck), would have instituted advanced technology like a door, which would have to be shut before the transporter could be operated.
Though the engineering areas of Federation ships in the movie seem to have plenty of railings and OSHA compliance (they would, since they were filmed in actual factories, like the Budweiser brewery!), there's no clear reason why those super-futuristic warp cores need so much smoke and fire, or why interplanetary shuttlecraft seem to emit so much steam.
The Star Wars galaxy is an OSHA inspector's nightmare, starting with indoor, 500+ foot deep (and often completely pointless) chasms that have no guardrails.
Even the Emperor's throne room has a Bottomless Pit with little waist-height rails. Its mouth is at the top of a skyscraper above the Death Star, bringing up some interesting Fridge Logic as to why this pit had to be extended up the building.
This could possibly be explained as using less metal to create the Death Star, making it less expensive.
Offhand it appears as though the spire is hollow with the elevator running up the middle, and what Palpatine gets chucked down is the interior of the spire.
In a A New Hope, the tractor beam's power is controlled through a panel perched on a tower over a bottomless pit. Also, the catwalk to access the controls is about a foot wide. And those two controller dudes perched on the itty bitty platform right next to the gigantic superlaser beam! The tractor beam part is lampshaded by Mythrol in The Mandalorian, when he complains about an Imperial base's reactor control terminal not having any guardrails, which is set up identically to the Death Star's tractor beam terminal, and is set up over a lava pit.
Another scene in the film where Luke and Leia are stuck in an arch way that has an extendable bridge over another giant chasm. Not only do we never get an explanation why the Death Star needs these giant trenches inside a space stationnote although Alan Dean Foster's novelisation explained them away as ventilation shafts, but we also see no sign that the extendable bridge has guard rails, nor was there anything preventing Luke from running off the edge through the open door way that didn't even have a warning about the giant trench (except perhaps his latent intuition due to the Force). Luke was able to effectively "lock" the door behind him by shooting the door control/bridge extension on his side, some how deactivating the door controls on the other side, all without a manual way to extend the bridge or open the door.
The Galactic Capital of Coruscant is chock full of Floating Platforms, none of which have proper railings, only an ankle-high border that most likely makes things worse by making it easier to trip and fall to your death. Not helped by the fact that so many people wear robes.
Padmé's apartment, at the top of a miles-high skyscraper, also has a huge open balcony with no railings in her living room. It is, however, convenient for parking a starfighter there so that one can make a dramatic exit. Hope she wasn't planning to raise her kids in the place though. (She isn't. There was an an entire scene where she discusses raising them on Naboo.)
The Geonosian Droid Factory from Attack of the Clones Is this even by the standards of the galaxy in-universe. Conveyor Belt o' Doom, retractable platforms, giant swinging arms that can decapitate a person, and giant vats for carrying molten being carried on rail located right next to more of the obligatory platforms with no guardrails. Despite this it is shown having a manual override that actually works and most of it is Justified as A. The factory has been closed down for centuries so it naturally would not be up to date in terms of safety standards. B. The Geonosian Aristocrats exhibit a We Have Reserves mentality, C. Said Reserves are conditioned solely to serve those Aristocrats and don't about the lack of safety standards. D. The entire operation is illegal. and E. The above mentioned retractable platform is meant to serve as a launchpad for the winged overseer drones to use.
Mustafar. Between the unstable (after Obi and Vader cause a Failsafe Failure) platforms all over and the lava, it is not surprising the Separatist Council chose this planet as their final hideout. The only thing keeping the place from melting to slag were the forcefields... which were disabled by two guys laser-swordfighting.
The Phantom Menace's climactic lightsaber battle maintained the franchise's proud standard of bottomless pits without safety rails around them.
Bizarrely, the primitive Ewoks actually have railings in their tree villages. Even more bizarrely, these are at a height suitable for human-sized beings (they are like chin-up bars for Ewoks).
Zig-zagged in The Force Awakens. Han Solo confronts Kylo/Ben on a narrow walkway with no handrails, then gets stabbed and falls to his death. Rey climbs around the inside of Starkiller Base using access panels which really should have some sort of walkway to them. On the other hand, several walkways ARE shown with safety railings.
It is likely that one of the biggest problems in the Star Wars universe is death by door. Palpatine must've hired Joseph-Ignace Guillotin as his interior designer.
The Death Star is a space-going battlestation, and the most fearsome weapon ever produced. It's expected that it's going to come under attack, especially by large ships with big guns trying to pulverize it. Decompression is a real risk, and given the Empire's proven disregard for human (to say nothing of non-human) life, it's no surprise at all that they would prioritize preventing the crew of a critical operations room from being blown into space over a few guys getting bisected by speed door. The even faster-and-heavier door in Padme's throne room? Anti-intruder security maybe? For a peace-loving agrarian society, the Naboo seem to have an abundance of practical paranoia, at least as far as their rulers are concerned.
The blast doors. These are quadruple-section doors that close in from the corners, leaving an increasingly-shrinking square in the middle. Yes, in the event of decompression or a firefight, these doors need to close quickly for the safety of the onboard personnel (and to prevent pesky intruders from escaping, natch). But if a body (organic or mechanical) gets caught in the opening and mulched by the doors, that's a whole lotta cleaning up involved, and that's if the doors don't jam from all that matter caught in them. An episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars has a Clone Trooper dying in exactly this way while trying to escape from a maximum-security Separatist prison planet. The actual death is off-screen, but you can tell exactly what happened. In "Shattered", Maul uses the Force to pull another Clone Trooper's arm into the path of blast doors while they are closing, with a Gory Discretion Shot accompanying the severed arm. The opening scene of The Mandalorian features a Quarren thug being bisected at the waist similar to the example in "Counterattack", except it happens with a Dilating Door in a saloon and there's a Gory Discretion Shot that time.
Pod racing on Tatooine is recklessly dangerous even by the standards of the Star Wars Universe. No safety inspection before the race, many places along the track you can ram other racers off the road and not be seen, the course winds through hazards like canyons and Sand People territory (who just love to shoot at the races), any pod, no matter how much of a death trap, is accepted, and even children are allowed to participate. Did we mention the part where the pods are basically two jet engines held together by a magnetic grid and rubber?
Also keep in mind that these podraces took place on a planet that was essentially run by organized crime (the Hutts), and the people who participated were either really good at it and a little bit crazy, people down on their luck hoping to win enough money to leave the planet, or slaves who were forced to participate. When Tusken Raiders camped out and started shooting at the racers (killing a couple), the crowd cheered. Nobody cared how unsafe it was, it was all part of the show.
This was elaborated on in Legends, where it's revealed that podracing was eventually banned by the Empire; not that this necessarily stops dangerous activities, since Swoop racing becomes popular afterwards. * Swoops are described as heavily modded speeder bikes that consist of a seat, handling controls, and an overpowered engine This was declared by some to be an example of Imperial bigotry, since almost all swoop racers are human while almost all podracers are non-human. If so, the Empire was accidentally doing the aliens a favor.
The cake is taken by Riot Racing in Star Wars: The Bad Batch; racers are armed with everything up to and including'' blasters. The episode in question takes things to the logical conclusion when a racer crashes and spins out while sending blaster bolts everywhere. A spectator is hit and killed by a stray blast.
In Return of the Jedi, the Imperial bunker on the forest moon of Endor has this issue. The rebels invade the bunker to blow it up and are ambushed by Imperials inside. Han, who was carrying a set of explosives, tosses it at one of the Imperial commanders and sends him flying backwards into the generator below. How low were the guard rails that allowed that to happen?
In a New Hope, Return of the Jedi, and Rogue One we see two Imperial officers stationed on a tiny platform next to a death without a railing... and also are completely unshielded from the Death Star's Laser.
Strangers on a Train: The climax takes place on a marry-go-round of a carnival that speeds up dangerously once the operator is accidentally shot and a lever for "Deadly Speed" is pulled down by him as he drops dead. You'd expect for some safety feature that at least slows the whole thing down gradually, but no. The only way to stop the out of control high-speed ride is to pull the brakes. Guess what happens.
The Terminator: The final fight takes place in a dangerous factory, with Sarah Connor using it as her only weapon.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day averts this, as the smelting factory here has plenty of guardrails, with the only spot without them intended for lowering objects into a vat. As soon as the liquid nitrogen tanker crashes and breaks open, one worker sets off an alarm and everyone immediately evacuates.
In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, when John and Kate are trying to escape from the Cyber Research Systems facility, they have to go through the particle accelerator to reach the runway.
Oddly, Terminator Salvation's factory at the end does have guardrails, even though it's been used for years by robots who would never need them.
In Three Big Men, Evil Spider-Man is gruesomely killed in various ways in a factory, including a printing press, crushed by gears, and even ran over by rail carts. SHEESH...
In the Martian spaceport the windows protecting the terminal from the near-vacuum outside: a) are not bulletproof, despite the presence of armed guards and agents, b) shatter completely from a handful of bullet holes, making those small holes into one large one, and c) have emergency shutters that must be activated manually, while holding on for dear life as the room rapidly decompresses. And the whole bay over the dome is just as fragile, minus the shutter due to its size.
Near the end of the movie Quaid and Richter fight on a large cargo elevator which ascends from a wide open room into a shaft with the walls flush right next to the edges of the elevator, with no guard rails or cage on the elevator to prevent something from getting caught in between and crushed. (Guess how the fight scene ends?)
Tragedy Girls: Surely having the light switch and the switch for the circular saw in the wood shop next to each other and looking identical is an accident waiting to happen? As demonstrated when Syl turns on the saw while trying to turn on the light, and is later killed by the saw when she is dragged into it by an extremely dangerously located hoist.
In both the film and comic versions of Watchmen, someone thought it was a good idea to have a room with what is essentially a disintegrator run on a timer. Meaning the timer automatically closes and locks the door, before activating the machine a bit later. All of this without anyone present to make sure someone doesn't wander through the door, get locked in and vaporized. Apparently there's not even an emergency stop switch anywhere near the machine either. Or, inside the room. And yet, the inability to open the door after the countdown's started? "It's a safety feature." In the comic, the font size of the text is intentionally taken down to point out that the scientist himself sees the stupidity of the safety feature.
In Warcraft (2016), Dalaran seems to have no railings whatsoever, which is especially problematic in that it's a city made of platforms floating hundreds of metres aboveground. Presumably, the magical inhabitants of Dalaran don't see the need for it, as they can turn into birds, teleport or cast shields long before hitting the ground.
In West Side Story (2021), Tony climbs up the fire escape, only to find that the gate on María's landing is locked. He lampshades how unsafe this is.
Tony: Locked?
María:Sí, but there's no key.
Tony: Well, that's against the law. You oughta report that.
The master control room is airtight, has no emergency exit, and in the event of a power failure, there is no way to open the doors or get fresh air into the room, or to contact the outside world, so everyone dies. Apparently this is standard engineering practice because the staff don't even seem all that surprised by this appalling lack of safety procedures, just frustrated that the power failed.
The concept of Westworld involves giving loaded firearms to ordinary tourists and encouraging them to engage in movie-style gunfights and barroom brawls, with the precaution that the guns won't fire directly at other tourists and the robots won't harm the tourists. These precautions seem totally inadequate! The tourists could cause all sorts of harm by careless handling of firearms even without directly shooting each other. And they could hurt themselves and others quite easily in a brawl, even if the robots don't attack them directly. However, there are possible justifications for this — a small degree of risk may be part of the appeal of Westworld, it is not clear whether it is located in a country with strict safety enforcement, and it is possible there are more safety precautions we are not told about.
The ending of White Heat is a fight scene that takes place in a chemical plant in Long Beach, CA. This one is somewhat justified in that there was a firefight where pipes and tanks were hit, and Cody randomly turned several valves in an attempt to cause distractions.
Wild Wild West: The cockpit for Loveless' Spider Tank is missing a big chunk of railing. Sure enough, one of his own henchwomen falls to her death when startled by the heroes.
The height of the hallway right before the chocolate room. note Yes, this is an issue; OSHA states that all ceilings must be at least 7'6"
Repeated lack of guardrails or banisters.
Repeated lack of safety equipment.
Many exposed hot pipes in the inventing room.
A deadly fan in the same room as soda that makes you float to it, with no sign of grating to prevent anyone from being chopped up.note Technically, as OSHA could file that as negligence under their other rules
The Wonka-Mobile covering everyone in foam and sending them through a car wash. Fun FactThis actually harmed the actors as well; the foam used — which Mat Pat says was soap but the text says was fire extinguisher foam — irritated their skin enough to require hospitalization.
discovered that the creation of the chief antagonist in 7 of the top 25 highest-grossing superhero films could have been prevented had said antagonists' employers followed basic workplace safety regulations.