Forklift Driver Klaus: The First Day on the Job (2001)

Simply A Masterpiece

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

The best way to describe this 15-year-old short film is maybe as an educational slasher movie. We follow Klaus, a new recruit in the profession of forklift driving while a narrator explains us what to pay attention to in this particular field. It all starts off pretty harmless as one colleague manages to get out of the way in time before another falls of Klaus's forklift truck. And in the next minutes, it gets really bloody and people are severed everywhere you could think of. Even if it runs only for 10 minutes, I found this film slightly repetitive near the end already. The filmmaker team Prehn and Wagner did not really have a great career after this one here even if it has become a bit of a cult movie and won several awards. The funniest thing for me in this mockumentary was maybe the acting from the supporting players, i.e. the victims. So bad it was funny. Intendedly over-the-top probably. Actually, the actor who plays Klaus is enjoying a prolific career and has been in a whole lot of movies before and after this short one here. Most of these are hopefully better than Klaus' first day at work. Not recommended.

This is one of those shorts that really surprises and delights. The fact that it is presented as your typical, cheesy safety-at-work type of video adds to the humour tremendously.Our man- Klaus- is beginning a new job as a forklift driver in a warehouse. He does all the things he shouldn't where safety is concerned and is suitably admonished by the patronising safety expert who provides the voice over. The accidents start out as the fairly typical toe-curling scenes one usually sees in such instructional films, but soon they multiply into totally over-the-top affairs.This may make it sound like a film only horror or gore fans would enjoy, but it really isn't. The effects are so daft that they would only put off the most extreme anti-blood viewers and I promise you that you will laugh yourself silly and be recommending it to your pals wholeheartedly. I certainly did, and everyone who's seen it has loved it.If anyone ever criticises the German sense of humour, you have all the ammo you could ever need to shoot them down with this little number.Can't recommend it enough.

If you have ever wondered if a forklift could be used as a deadly weapon, look no further than the German short film Staplerfahrer Klaus: Der Erste Arbeitstag.It starts out like any one of those cheesy workplace safety videos, with the narrator and animations explaining the do's and don't's of forklift operation, as our main character Klaus blunders his way through the first day of work. However, it's not long before his mistakes result in his coworkers dying in hilariously over-the-top gory fashions. Even as if the body count grows higher and higher, the film never really stops trying to be a serious workplace safety video, which is why the whole thing had me in stitches.Staplerfahrer Klaus is in German, but you certainly don't need to understand the language to enjoy this short.

A safety instruction video for forklift drivers follows young Klaus as he begins his first day on the job as a qualified forklift truck driver. The film highlights hazards and areas where accidents can easily occur in order to train others.This short starts really well, taking the sort of straight laced, voice over heavy safety training video we've all seen and stretching it to the extreme. At the start it's amusing. However the accidents start to get more extreme and also a lot more gory as the short goes on. Eventually it turns into a gore fest which is still funny but not as funny as it was at the start.The reason for this is that the gore is pretty unpleasant and also pretty cheap. The film felt like it was becoming about the effects rather than the humour. As a gore short it worked OK and if you like things like Bad Taste etc then this'll be a walk in the park for you!However for me the gore just became the focus and everything else that had potential at the start of the film just basically was pushed to the back for a violent, unpleasant and unfunny final five minutes.Like I said – an acquired taste but maybe worth a watch if that's your humour. I felt it dumped it's humour in order to show off just how gory it could be on a small budget.