Lethal Chef / Live-Action Films

aka: Film

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• Ajnabee: Priya is completely clueless when it comes to cooking, having been spoiled by her father who cooked for her. When she has to cook on her own after marrying, she is constantly burning the food and even herself.
• Played with in Annie. Annie is astonished that literally everything in Stacks' fridge is take out. She tries to ingratiate herself with him by telling him "I can make a meal out of any five ingredients you pick!" It looks at first like Annie is going to show off her "poor person ingenuity", but it comes out so disgusting that they both Spit Take on tasting it, but it works to get them talking. They get so into their conversation that they forget how gross the meal is and take another bite, only to Spit Take it again. Annie doesn't give up on trying to cook, though. She brings Stacks breakfast, but it's burnt toast and other stuff that is not as readily identifiable. This time, though, he gets off the hook by feeding it all to a willing Sandy.
• In the film version of The A-Team, Murdock shows some shades of this. His preparation of steak involves sprinkling cordite on them, and then flipping them over to allow it to flame up. His "special sauce" (containing anti-freeze), induced Bell's Palsy in Face (which Murdock shrugged of as "only partial paralysis"). What keeps him from being considered a full-on lethal chef is that he has been shown to be really good at the job as well. His curry tapenade is what is used to calm down B.A. after his being drugged and brought on board a ship.
• The Battleship Potemkin: The sailors revolt after being given rotting, maggot-infested meat to eat for the umpteenth time.
• Lane Meyer's mother Jenny (played by Kim Darby) from the 1985 John Cusack film Better Off Dead. In one scene Jenny is shown cooking a pot full of something emitting a suspicious mist from which tentacles wave, and in another, one of her dishes actually crawls off of Lane's plate when he pokes it with a fork. Even her "ordinary" meals are somewhat ... skewed, as evidenced by the "French-themed" dinner she makes for a French exchange student — consisting entirely of foods with the word "French" in their names, like French dressing and French toast.
  "It's got raisins in it... you like raisins!"
• In the Blue Collar Comedy Tour movie, comedian Ron White tells a joke about how his wife was such a bad cook that he tried to feed it to his dog and it started licking its butt. His wife asks "What's he doing?" and he goes "It looks like he's trying to get the taste out of his mouth!"
• In the first Bridget Jones book (and movie), Bridget attempts to cook soup from scratch. The recipe says to tie some of the ingredients together with string before putting them in the pot. She uses blue plastic string and turns the soup blue. It's later referred to as String Soup.
  Tom: To Bridget, who cannot cook, but who we love just as she is.
• Bullshot: Rosemary Fenton's rock-hard scones are a Running Gag. When the hero nearly breaks a tooth on one and tries to covertly dispose of the scone, he finds every hiding place in the house already stuffed with scones discarded by previous guests.
• Humphrey of Cannibal! The Musical:
  Miller: [seeing their dinner] You son of a bitch, Humphrey.
  Humphrey: Come on, you haven't even tried it.
  [Miller takes a mouthful]
  Miller: You son of a bitch, Humphrey.
• In the first Charlie's Angels film, Lucy Liu's character Alex makes completely inedible muffins. Another Angel throws one at a door, and it almost goes through, getting stuck in it. When one is slammed into a plate, it makes an ominous metallic clunk.
• "Crocodile" Dundee invokes this trope for laughs in-universe. When Mick first takes Sue into the Outback, he cooks her a dinner of goanna (the Australian name for a monitor lizard), wild plants, and insect larva. She hesitantly asks if it's what he eats, at which point he says "eh, you can live off it, but it tastes like shit." He then produces a can of beans, indicating that he was just screwing with her.
• In Down Periscope, on the submarine Stingray, hyper executive officer Marty Pascal is berating the cook, Buckman, for the ill-kept nature of his kitchen, when he spies an open can.
  Pascal: Jesus, Buckman! This stuff's been on the Stingray since Korea! This can expired in 1966!!
  Buckman: [tastes from the can] What's the matter, sir? It still tastes like creamed corn...
  Pascal: Except it's deviled ham!!
  Buckman: ... That would be a problem.
• Isabelle in The Dreamers cooks for narrator Matthew and her brother Theo. The food is so badly burned that they can't tell the souffle from the ratatouille, and tastes so bad that Matthew can't swallow it. Theo happily goes downstairs and raids the neighbors' garbage for an alternative meal.
• In Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988), Elvira attempts to cook a meal from a secret family cookbook. Unfortunately, the "secret cookbook" is actually a spellbook, and the resulting vaguely food-like monstrosity attempts to eat the diners. The spray whipped cream is a nice touch.
• Jake and Eddie from Ernest Goes to Camp, especially when it comes to their infamous "Eggs Erroneous" which is apparently made of powdered eggs and yellow modeling clay. This is to say nothing of their attempt to make Chicken Pot Pie which consists of nothing but combining a rubber chicken, a kitchen pot, and a frozen pie in a home-made food processor. They actually weaponize their skills in the Final Battle, using their "Liver-Loaf Lunch Arranger" to launch their less-than-palatable entrees at the miners, and the aforementioned Eggs Erroneous help destroy a bulldozer.
• In Gone in Sixty Seconds, it takes Kip Raines less than sixty seconds to dump salt and beer in an ugly egg scramble and serve it with a side of burnt-black toast. It's enough to make even Memphis lose his cool.
• Iron Man 2 reveals a Gadgeteer Genius like Tony is ironically clueless when it comes to cooking as he spends three hours trying to make Pepper an omelette during a flight that ends up looking like a chemical disaster. Tony does somewhat improve later on as he's shown cooking in Civil War and tries helping Pepper out with lunch in a Deleted Scene in Endgame but she wisely tells him to keep out of it when he nearly messes up a salad.
• In Jack Frost, the Sheriff manages to find out the killer snowman is vulnerable to antifreeze after it is exposed to his son's oatmeal. His son apparently put highly-toxic antifreeze in the oatmeal because he did not want his father to get cold.
• Roger Murtaugh's wife from the Lethal Weapon series is not known to be skilled in the kitchen, as evidenced by the following exchange:
  Murtaugh: What the hell, thin's my middle name.
  Riggs: Your wife's cooking, I'm not surprised.
  [fires his gun several more times]
  Murtaugh: What? What?
  Riggs: Nothin'.
  Murtaugh: Remarks like that will not get you invited to Christmas dinner.
  Riggs: My luck's changing for the better every day.
• The extended edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers reveals Éowyn to be a terrible cook, who proudly presents Aragorn with a bowl of "stew" containing some limp boiled leaves, a solid lump of fat, and a puddle of liquid shimmering with grease. As a royal princess who seems to disdain feminine activities, it makes some sense that her cooking skills are underdeveloped. Aragon displays his true chivalrous nobility after having taken a spoonful of it, he claims (not without effort) to the anxiously watching Éowyn that “it’s good” and halts his action of dumping the bowl after Éowyn turns around to ask him something else. Made even funnier by the fact Éowyn moments before approaching Aragorn, offered it to Gimli (a Big Eater dwarf) who quickly and politely declined after taking one look at the stew.
• Manborg has Justice, who is probably the only person in fiction or otherwise who can make boxed mac and cheese explosive.
• The Menu reveals that Tyler is one. In spite of his passion for food and obsession over Chef Julian Slowik, Tyler can't cook his way out of a paper bag. When Chef Slowik dares him to actually make food as opposed to eating or taking photos of it, Tyler ends up making undercooked lamb and some chopped leeks and shallots sautéed in way too much butter that didn't even melt completely before the veggies went into the pan, all "seasoned" only with dirt from the unwashed leeks, which the film aptly calls "Tyler's Bullshit."
• Jack Black's character Nacho from Nacho Libre is like this initially. Once he makes enough money (through his wrestling) to purchase better ingredients, he's capable of making dishes that at least look appetizing.
• On the Buses: Olive can't cook to save her life - Stan and Arthur enjoy the Cornish pasties that they think Mrs. Butler has made for them, but once they learn they were made by Olive, they are hesitant to finish them, while Stan later hopes that he'll get some more overtime when she becomes the canteen cook as he claims half the bus crews will come down with food poisoning:
  Olive: Anyway, if it makes them ill, it'll make you ill too.
  Stan: Not me, love. I've been eatin' your grub for years.
  Arthur: 'Ere, it's like snake charmers. After they've been bitten a few times, they become immune.
• The lunch cook in Principal Takes A Holiday is shown to make barely-edible food. When the new fake principal decides to try it, he goes to the kitchen in disgust and forces the cook to eat his own food, telling him he'll have to do this from now on. When the real principal shows up, he remarks how things have improved, including the fact that the food is actually pretty decent now.
• In the Danish Pusher film series, Serbian druglord Milo runs a restaurant as his cover and likes to feed his criminal associates his creations, which are apparently terrible. In the third film, he gives his whole gang food poisoning right when he needs them most, leaving him to his own devices.
• When Mervyn from Raising the Wind is hungry, there are only a few things he won't eat. One of them being Jill's goulash.
• The classic Laurel and Hardy film Saps at Sea has them cooking breakfast for a thug. But there's no food. So they make a fake, substituting brewed chewing tobacco for coffee, string for spaghetti, red paint for sauce, sponges for meatballs, grated soap for cheese... Unfortunately he finds out and tells them to eat it first.

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