Bela Lugosi slips Dwight Frye's Renfield a mickey in his wine in Dracula, and uses the same deceit to turn his victims into zombie thralls in White Zombie. In Bride Of Frankenstein, Boris Karloff's Frankenstein's Monster gets to indulge in a bit of the vino- courtesy of the kindly blind hermit, but the party is cut short by the arrival of a couple of ignorant, gun-toting peasants.
In Frank Capra's lively adaptation of Arsenic And Old Lace, Cary Grant discovers that his batty old aunts like to invite strange, elderly gentlemen into the parlor for a nice glass of elderberry wine poisoned with arsenic. Throughout the movie, various characters unwittingly pour themselves a drink from the poisoned bottle.
Inspired in certain, obvious respects by The Day The Earth Stood Still, the early sci-fi film Devil Woman From Mars has the inebriate inhabitants of a rural British pub terrorized by a dominatrix from outer space (whose tight-fitting togs are strangely reminiscent of Darth Vader's in the Star Wars films) with a little help from her behemoth robot thug. In spite of the inevitable sexual domination and destruction of the Earth, these down-to-earth alcoholics are never so distressed by the ominous state of affairs to put down their drinks.
Dour lush Elisha Cooke Jr. opens the doors to his House On Haunted Hill for a party hosted by Vincent Price and his rather disagreeable wife. Cooke's character, who believes the house is haunted by homicidal ghosts, starts hitting the bottle hard when it's revealed that he and the other doomed guests are locked into the dreadful domicile for the night. In the 1999 Dark Castle remake, comic actor Chris Kattan's identical character reacts in much the same way when the catty cast is imprisoned by the house.
In the AIP anthology Tales Of Terror, Peter Lorre plays a hardcore drunkard who finds himself pitted against Vincent price in a wine-tasting contest, ala Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado. Eventually, Peter slips his rival a drug in a glass of Amontillado, and walls him and his own adulterous wife up in the cellar alive. Later on, however, he suffers a nightmarish delirium that helps (along with a pesky black cat) to lead suspicious police to his crime. The team of Peter Lorre and Vincent Price nicely capture the whimsical tone of the blackly amusing story by Poe (a man who was known to imbibe on occasions, himself.)
In the obscure indy Street Trash, the boozing residents of an urban slum fall victim to a budget label of hooch by the name of Viper, which causes it's victims to melt down to into a colorful goo.
Robert Rodriguez's rowdy vampire flick From Dusk Till Dawn features several interesting scenes related to alcoholic beverages, starting with the fiery heist at "Benny's World Of Liquor" where bad guy protagonists George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino- as the outlaw Gecko brothers -cover the proprietor with hard liquor and set him on fire. His fiery demise foreshadows the climactic vampire deaths later on in the movie. Arriving later at the south-of-the-border strip club the Titty Twister, the brothers drink heavily. At one point, Tarantino drinks tequila poured down the leg of voluptuous stripper Salma Hayak, a vampire who ultimately puts the bite on him.
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