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Tampering With Food And Drink / Live-Action Films

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Tampering with Food and Drink in Live-Action Films.


  • 12-Hour Shift: Nurse Mandy offers coffee to the security guard watching over the hospitalized inmate, failing to mention she added morphine.
  • Spoofed in The Addams Family: Fester brought some cyanide with him when he moved in, with the implication that he'd poison the family this way. When Morticia finds it, she just smiles and asks if he thought they'd run out of it. The implication is the family uses cyanide as seasoning.
  • In Andhadhun, Simi pours poison into Akash's tea in front of his eyes (he's pretending to be blind). After he "accidentally" spills the tea, he finds out that a sweet he ate earlier was also poisoned.
  • In The Assassination Bureau, Eleanora first poisons her husband Cesare, the Italian assassin, then prepares drinks for herself and Dragomiloff, slipping poison in his drink. Dragomiloff spins the table until it stops, picks up the goblet in front of him, drinks down the contents, and falls to the floor. He was faking it.
  • In Battle Royale, Yuko Sakaki puts potassium cyanide in spaghetti that Yukie Utsumi's friends cooked for Shuya Nanahara. Yuko then tries to deliver the spaghetti to Shuya personally, but Yuka Nakagawa snatches it away and eats it. She then suffers from the poisoning, vomits much of her blood out of her mouth, then quickly dies. This results in Haruka, Yukie, Chisato (but ironically, not Yuko) all getting shot by Satomi out of suspicion she can't trust any of the girls.
  • In Beethoven, while entertaining Brad and Brie, who have rubbed the entire Newton family the wrong way, Brad asks for a refill of lemonade. Alice takes the glass, and fills it up, but when no one is looking, she takes a swig, and spits it back in the glass.
  • Johnny from The Big Cube slips LSD into people's drinks at parties. He's kicked out of medical school after one of his victims runs into traffic and dies. Later, he and Lisa hide LSD inside Adriana's anxiety pills.
  • In Blind Date, Walter uses a tiny syringe to put alcohol in chocolates he has delivered to Nadia because she has an extreme allergic reaction to alcohol.
  • In the early Peter Falk flick The Bloody Brood, Falk plays a psychotic beatnik who feeds some poor kid a hamburger filled with broken glass to watch him die... just for kicks.
  • One of the final revelations Detective Ma receives in Bloody Reunion is that the victims of the massacre had all been poisoned before their bodies were mutilated. When he returns to the scene of the crime, he discovers that the cake Mi-Ja served everyone had been poisoned.
  • In The Body (2012), Álex spikes his wife Mayka's wine with TH-16: a cardie-toxin that causes a cardiac arrest 8 hours after ingestion. He later learns that Carla/Eva spiked his own drink with TH-16 just before he left for the morgue: almost 8 hours earlier.
  • In Casino Royale (2006), James Bond gets an absolutely fatal dose of digitalis in his drink. It's subverted with the defibrillator/first aid kit in his car, and that in turn is subverted when he doesn't have it connected properly. Vesper Lynd's arrival is just dumb luck.
  • The massacre of adults of Gatlin in Children of the Corn (1984) starts when some diner patrons start choking from their poisoned coffee.
  • Downplayed and subverted in Children's Party at the Palace. The Grand High Witch planned to put her potion in the Queen's cake that would turn whoever eats from it into mice, until she finds out there was no cake to begin with. Eventually the villains bake their own cake with her potion in it...but turns out the potion had no effect on the Goodies.
  • The Court Jester combines this with Poisoned Chalice Switcheroo.
    The pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle, the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true.
    No! The Flagon with the Dragon holds the pellet with the poison, the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true.
  • In The Crime Doctor's Strangest Case, the bedbound Walter Burns is murdered by someone poisoning his coffee.
  • In Crooked House, the murderer doses Josephine's hot chocolate with cyanide, although Josephine is not the one who ends up drinking it.
  • In Dead Again in Tombstone, Zerelda attempts to dispose of Boomer by lacing his eggs with cyanide.
  • Doctor in Clover: Sir Lancelot never goes to a hospital party without a flask as it makes the orangeade taste better and makes the nurses friendlier. Dr. Grimsdyke has the same idea, as do Preston and some of the other medical students.
  • The Axis powers in FDR American Badass attempt to covertly attack US by smuggling in tainted alcohol that can turn anyone consuming it to a werewolf.
  • The Four Musketeers (1974). D'Artagnan receives a case of wine along with a note that indicates it's from his fellow Musketeers. Before he can drink any of it, an enemy mook drinks some and dies; it was poisoned wine sent by Milady to kill him.
  • In The Gentlemen, Mickey has Lord George's tea poisoned, then leaves him with the antidote, the point having been to demonstrate that he could get to Lord George anywhere.
  • In Ghost Ship there's a flashback comprised of a montage of images of what occurred on the ocean liner. During this, there's a scene in the kitchen where cooks are putting rat poison in food. We then see passengers eating the food and one person vomits as a result.
  • In Good Burger, after many failed attempts at getting Ed to spill the beans of the secret recipe of his homemade sauce (which put Good Burger in business over Mondo Burger), Kurt, owner of the latter restaurant, and his employees lock up Ed and Dexter in the asylum and break into Good Burger, in which they douse the sauce with shark poison, hoping whoever devours some will file a lawsuit against Good Burger to put it out of business for good. Luckily, Dexter and Ed make it in time to break the news to the other employees before a single customer is able to eat a drop of the sauce.
  • Guyana: Crime of the Century: At one point in the movie, stimulants are dosed into food, with the proportions doubled for sandwiches and soft drinks, under Johnson's orders.
  • Done twice in Disney's The Haunted Mansion (2003) with poison being put into goblets of wine.
  • In He's Out There, Maddy eats a poisoned cupcake that she finds in the woods, planted by the killer.
  • In A Jolly Bad Fellow, Bowles-Otterly poisons his first two victims by by slipping the poison into their drinks: giving Dr. Brass a glass of laced claret, and dosing Mrs Pugh-Smith's gin-spiked water.
  • In Kate the title character is a professional killer who discovers she has been poisoned with Polonium-204, giving her accute radiation poisoning. She quickly realises the culprit was a man she picked up for a one-night stand, though he'd been told by his employers he was Slipping a Mickey instead.
  • In Kill Bill Vol. 2, Elle Driver reveals that she murdered Pai Mei by poisoning his fish heads.
  • The Killing Kind: On realising that Terry is beyond help and that he will undoubtedly kill again, Thelma gives him a glass of chocolate milk laced with poison and then holds him in her lap as he dies.
  • Kind Hearts and Coronets: Unlike the more elaborate murders he concocts for his other targets, Louis disposes of the Reverend Lord Henry d'Ascoyne through the simple expedient of poisoning his wine.
  • Kull the Conqueror: Subverted. Kull and his friends board the ship of Juba, one of Kull's old associates from his days as a pirate, to travel to an island that contains the one weapon that can destroy the villainess. Juba serves them food and wine, which Kull suspects to be poisoned and only partakes after Juba drinks and eats from it himself. It turns out that the food wasn't poisoned, but it was drugged. Juba's men tie up Kull and his team while their boss is unconscious.
  • Parodied and averted in Lemonade Joe, a relentless parody of The Western. Hogo Fogo has kidnapped Winnifred and plans to subject her to a fate worse than death, but is eating dinner in the saloon first. His brother, the less evil saloon owner, says he thinks Hogo's disgusting. Hogo opens his ring, puts some powder into a glass of water, and mixes it in. It looks like he'll try to make his brother drink it; however, he then drinks it himself, and burps. It was antacid. He keeps eating his dinner, glutton that he is.
  • In The Man with Nine Lives, Dr. Kravaal drugs the soup Judy serves the thawed Human Popsicles to knock them out so he can use them as guinea pigs for his experiments.
  • In M.F.A., Noelle spikes the drink of one of the frat boy rapists with a date rape drug, then holds him down so he chokes on his own vomit.
  • Mrs. Doubtfire: Daniel Hillard spikes his ex-wife's new paramour's meal with pepper after overhearing him stress to the waiter to not put pepper on it, as he's allergic. Even though the whole sequence is Played for Laughs, they came pretty close to the possibly fatal consequences of such a prank — upon tasting the pepper, the man almost immediately begins choking, prompting Daniel to say, "Oh no, I killed the bastard!"
  • In Murder at the Baskervilles, Hunter is murdered when powdered opium is slipped into his curried lamb.
  • Murder by Death: Lionel Twain arranges for one of the cups of wine served to the guests to have a tasteless, odorless acidic poison in it. It turns out to be a subversion: Twain made sure the cup with the poisoned wine was served to the one guest who could identify it.
  • The horror movie Night of the Demons (1988) features a mean old man who puts razor blades in apples on Halloween to do terrible things to children. At the end of the movie, his wife makes an apple pie out of the leftover apples, which he eats. The blades slash through his throat and leave him dead.
  • In On the Buses, Stan and Jack spike the female bus drivers' cups of tea with Olive's diuretic pills to make them seem unreliable. Blakey ends up drinking a cup of tea meant for Vera and suffers the same effects.
  • In Raiders of the Lost Ark, an Arab working for the Nazis pours poison on dates in Sallah's house in the hope that Sallah and/or Indy will eat them. The monkey steals the poisoned dates instead.
  • In Rehearsal for Murder, Karen and Leo's motive revolves around them supposedly giving Monica a herbal tea to "calm her nerves", which was actually spiked to make her too sick to perform on opening night.
  • In Sahara (2005), we have a rare version where the perpetrator is one of the good guys; Jim Sandecker gives multiple requests before he decides to do any more work for the US government, but we don't hear him say the last one; the next scene is Massarde being poisoned in a restaurant by Jim's ally, Carl.
  • Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes duology:
    • Being aware of this doesn't prevent it, as seen in Sherlock Holmes (2009). Irene Adler pulls a clever one on Holmes in using an unopened bottle of wine. A flashback reveals she used a syringe to inject a knockout drug through the cork, and a match to re-melt the wax and conceal the hole.
    • At the beginning of the next movie, Irene is smart enough to ask for a fresh pot of tea when meeting with Professor Moriarty, rather than drinking from the one already on the table. Unfortunately Moriarty has bought out the entire restaurant. All the potential witnesses get up and leave at his signal, and the new pot turns out to be poisoned. Cue Sound-Only Death.
  • Prior to the final battle of The Shaolin Temple (1976), the traitorous Master Monk Hui-xian decides to poison all his fellow monks by spiking their breakfast, rendering them helpless and unable to defend themselves when the Manchurian army invades.
  • In The Sixth Sense one of the dead people the kid sees is a small girl who was poisoned by her mother putting cleaning fluid in her soup.
  • Special Silencers has a horrifying example; the villain, Gundar, has a bunch of pills that transforms a person's insides into plants, and selectively executes his victims by spiking the pills inside their food and beverage. His victims all died from having branches and roots coming out their bodies, Chest Burster-style.
  • Sympathy for Lady Vengeance: In prison, Geum-ja kills the Witch by adulterating her food with bleach. For three years!
  • John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) has the characters being Properly Paranoid about this — one single cell could be enough to turn anyone into a Thing. "I think everyone had better prepare their own food from now on..."
  • In Thirteen Women, Ursula attempts to murder Laura's son Bobby by sending him a box of poisoned chocolates.
  • Up the Front: When seducing Lurk, Mata Hari sneaks a Truth Serum drug into his drink. However, Lurk catches on and switches the drinks, leading to the two to switch the drinks back and forth until neither know who has the drugged glass. After the two uncertainly take a sip, Mata Hari discovers she has had it.
  • Wedding Crashers: At dinner in one scene, John proceeds to spike Zach's water with eye-drops, which makes him sick, thereby letting John connect with Claire, Zach's fiance.
  • In The Three Stooges short "Who Done It?", the villainess prepares two drinks and slips poison in Shemp's drink. The two distract each other while they switch the goblets. Finally, Shemp drinks down the poison and goes through some hysterical death throes. Naturally, he recovers.
  • Wild Tales: In Las Ratas, the waitress refuses the cook's offer to put rat poison in Cuenca's food, but the cook poisons it anyway.
  • Wild Things: Double subverted. When after all the backstabbing between the conspirators only a final guy and girl are left, the guy is smart enough to expect the drink he's offered to be poisoned but is assured when the girl tells him that she would be an idiot to try it because he's the only one who can pilot the sailboat they're on back to shore. This is a lie—the drink is indeed poisoned, and the girl is much smarter than she made herself out to be. Just to be sure, she releases one of the booms to knock him into the water to drown.
  • In The Witch Files, Jules gives MJ a green smoothie laced with ergot. MJ, having been forewarned, tosses it in the bin as soon as she is out of sight.
  • The Wrestler: Randy, in his day job at the deli counter of a local grocery store, encounters a particularly indecisive elderly lady who keeps asking for "a little more" or "a little less" potato salad. Annoyed at her, he discreetly licks a few dips of his gloved fingers as he's disposing of excess. He later on proceeds to cut some meat and intentionally slice his fingers open and bleed on everyone in a Screw This, I'm Outta Here move.
  • This is Graham's standard M.O. in The Young Poisoner's Handbook: poisoning food and drink. Tea is his most common medium, but he also uses sandwiches, chocolates, pickles, beer, etc.


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