I know it’s usually books that people want to know the names of, but I have a half-remembered movie that is driving me crazy that I can’t remember it.

What I remember most about it was that the trailer made it sound like a fairly straightforward move about a little kid being kidnapped and a guy who (I think) used to be a criminal but was now a cop trying to find the kid because he knew the locals.

But, that was like the first 15 minutes, which is about when they find the kid. The rest of the movie is full of twists, none of which I can remember.

The main guy — I don’t think he was a big name actor, even though he was very good. He was in the mold of Edward Norton or Denzel Washington, though. That kind of mildly good-looking seriousness.

I know it’s not a lot to go on, which is why I haven’t been able to Google it or find it on IMDb.

Kim

*****

I am desperately trying to figure out the name of a Spanish-language game show that aired during the early ’90s. I had totally forgotten about it until recently and now I am going crazy trying to figure out the name or where I can find even a single old episode online.

My knowledge of the show is slightly hampered by the fact that I do not in fact know Spanish, so all of my understanding of the show is based on what I could figure out from visual cues at age 10. Somehow, though, I actually have a fair bit of info but still nothing is popping up on Google or the like.

Stuff I know:

• Spanish-language, but no idea what country it was produced in. I remember thinking that it was Mexican at the time but that could be totally wrong.
• It was a stunt-based game show (think the physical aspects of Fear Factor as opposed to the gross-out ones), and whatever country it came from was clearly not a litigious one because the stunts were REALLY dangerous. I swear I remember one contestant having to put on a flame-retardant suit and then get lit on fire at one point (and then having to score some points with a soccer ball while on fire…seriously, this is my memory of the show). There were also a lot of underwater stunts in which the contestants were not given breathing apparatuses. I may be making this up but I also am pretty sure that someone got hooked up to a mild version of an electric chair once too.
• The whole thing took place in a studio set which looked like a giant game board with the contestants being the game pieces. They had to spin a wheel in order to move around the board and depending on where they landed, it determined the stunt.
• There were girls in can-can-esque skirts all in bright colors that ran around the studio dancing, and a male host.
• The most specific thing I know: the name of the show had something to do with a pun about ducks. Not knowing Spanish, I have no idea what the pun was, but somehow there was a pun in the title with ducks and as a result the logo of the show was a cartoon’s duck’s face in a circle and there were duck-themed things all around the show.

If the readers have any idea what I am talking about or, better yet, where I could find an episode, I would be ever so grateful. At the time the show seemed very outrageous and I’m curious to see if it holds up over time.

Ro

*****

Hi Sars,

I hope that the TN readership can help me identify a movie that I saw a piece of on TV a few years back. I doubt it will be a DVD that I’ll want to run right out and buy, but it has burrowed it’s way into my brain and maybe knowing what it is will help me to remove it. So, the flick…

It was some kind of a war movie, but I don’t know if it was a movie actually about the war or just about events and people leading up to the war. Based on what I saw, I would guess it was set somewhere in SE Asia, and it looked like it might have been the English or the French (possibly the Americans, but I’m not convinced) getting rousted out of whatever country they’d been occupying.

I’m going way out on a limb and saying the setting was roughly the 1930s-1950s…but due to the production values and less-than-stellar attention to costuming/makeup details, it could have been set any time up to about the 1970s. I think the primary characters might have been some mercenaries/occupying soldiers, trying to rescue some people. None of the actors were anyone I recognized.

The scene I remember best is of a train carrying away some of the — European? — characters, and there was some question about whether the train would get up to speed and get away before all of the native soldiers pouring out of the jungle behind it would catch up to it and kill everyone. (Or possibly the train was slowing down for some reason and the people on the train were watching in despair as their killers caught up to them.)

Either way, there was a young woman and an older man (father, uncle, older husband, I don’t know) standing on the little platform-thingy at the back of the last train car, and she was sobbing and upset (understandably, I think) about the horror going on around her. He was trying to comfort her, and turned her head so she was crying into his shoulder and couldn’t see the people chasing the train. Then we see him pull a revolver out of his pocket and put it to the back of her head — obviously ready to kill her if need be to keep her out of the native dudes’ clutches. I think there must have been a commercial break at this point, because I have no idea if he killed her or if they got away or what. (If I had to guess, I’d guess that he shot her.)

There were a few other tiny snippets that stood out…a nun getting chased along a hallway/balcony by one of the native soldiers and a totally gratuitous shot of her habit being ripped off to show her underwear before she gets dragged into a room screaming. One of the English/French/whatever soldiers being overcome, having his pants ripped off and being bent over a table, begging someone to kill him before the disgruntled natives have their way with him. (All this happened in the same room/building, I believe.)

This was by no means what you would call a good movie. But it was violent enough and I was young enough that it made one hell of an impression, and I’d like to finally know what it was.

I don’t remember the movie being very gory or bloody. Lots of screaming and yelling and clear indications of what was about to happen, but then lots of cuts to other shots without actually showing any details. But, that may just have been the couple of scenes I remember. Also, I am 90% sure that the movie title is one word, possibly with an exclamation point at the end.

I’ve been to IMDB and the like, and I can’t figure out what on earth this movie might have been. Any help from the readers would be greatly appreciated.

Suze (not Orman)

*****

Sars,

The Google-fu is usually strong with me, but I’ve been Googling this one off and on for years and come up empty-handed and frustrated every time. I’ve watched with pride as the Nation has tracked down book after obscure, faintly-remembered book, so I’m crossing my fingers that someone will come to the rescue for me on this one:

About ten years ago, my mother checked a book out from the library; I read part of it and was immediately hooked, but she returned it before I got to finish it. I have even asked her to request an account history from the library, but they only started using electronic records very recently so that didn’t help. I have gone to the library that she uses and gone shelf by shelf, row by row, but either I’m missing it, it’s always checked out, or they’ve purged it from the shelves.

My memory is VERY sketchy as to the details, so some of the things I’m going to ascribe to the story might be off, but as best as I can remember:

It was about a young woman who lived in a very old-fashioned and rigidly-moraled community of fishermen. It had a sort of Scottish flavor, or Greenland/Iceland, perhaps — someplace fairly windswept and remote, offering a harsh beauty and frequently brutal existence. I suppose the book could be classified as fantasy, but in sort of a “slightly alternate reality” sense — I remember thinking that it was just fantasy enough to count for the genre, but there were no swords or dragons or faerie.

The young woman was in love with a young man, who was unfortunately away for a while (on an annual seafaring journey, hadn’t returned, presumed lost at sea). Another man in the community — a smarmy bigwig type — had taken an interest in her, and had asked her to marry him. Now, the community had some sort of a law where, upon the third request of the man, the woman was obligated to marry him — regardless of her preference. The man took advantage of her beloved’s absence to ask her to marry him three times (she tried to avoid him, but he accosted her while she was gathering seaweed or shells or something — every time I see the book The Shell Seekers I get momentarily excited and think I’ve found it; that phrase is strongly linked to this book in my memory). She was trying to delay the marriage to allow for her beloved’s return, at which point she could marry him (they were already promised) and not have to deal with smarmy bigwig guy.

In the eyes of the community, this made her something akin to a witch or possessed woman, and there was a lot of outrage that she was trying to “buck the system” by not marrying this guy. (Everyone thought he was the bomb-diggity, but she could see what a creep he was.) She may have in fact been a healer or spell-crafter of some sort; I think she lived alone at the edge of the village in the cottage that had been her mother’s, but I’m not sure. She was definitely a “black sheep” type of character, and her attempts to avoid marrying the bigwig intensified that, and put her in danger at the hands of the community.

In addition, there was some kind of genetic glitch such that very few of the community’s babies survived, to the extent that babies were not even acknowledged until they had lived for (I think) a month — that is to say, the mothers were not allowed out of the house and no one was allowed in, not even the husband/father. The young woman’s friend had a baby who, predictably, died, and the young woman was baffled and a bit annoyed by her friend’s grief — after all, she felt, she should have expected it. (This is why I think the woman had some healing or medicine-woman/shaman-like skills — I think she had become sort of immune to the deaths of the infants because she had seen so many.) Some time later, the young woman has her own baby (by the beloved? the unwanted suitor? I don’t know!!) and when it also dies, she regrets her earlier impatience with her friend.

That is all I remember, and those details may not even be 100% correct — but they’re close. Does ANYONE recognize this book?? I swear, if I can’t figure it out soon, I’m going to have to write it myself and wait to see who sues me for plagiarism, and I can’t really afford the legal fees.

(And as a side note, any suggestions for the slightly-altered-reality/history genre? I’ve about run out of new titles.)

Bibliophibian

*****

Dear Sars,

I’m hoping the readers can help me find some (okay, four) short stories I read as a kid. I think these stories were all in a single science-fiction anthology, but I could also be mashing up books in my head.

The story I remember best involved a substitute teacher to an elementary school class. At the start of the day, she is informed that one of the students has been replaced by an…alien? presence. (I don’t remember whether the story takes place on Earth or not.) The teacher, because she’s just a sub, doesn’t know the students, and she’s got to figure out which kid is the alien and send it out of the classroom to be destroyed. Of course, if she picks wrong, an innocent child will die. (Spoiler: She picks right.)

In another story, a boy and a girl — young teens, maybe — are enslaved when Earth (I’m pretty sure it’s Earth this time.) is taken over by alien overlords. The boy and the girl see each other every hundred years or so (the aliens upped everyone’s lifespan?) at the “celebration” of the takeover.

Two more stories were more conventional and less science-fiction-y, which makes me think I’m combining two books here: In one, an older teen is slowly dying of cancer; she’s already lost her leg, and there’s a confrontation with her mom — who’d been insisting that the girl would live — at the end. In the other, a teen confronts another girl who’s stolen a watch from her locker.

Like I said, I read these stories when I was a kid (late ’80s to early ’90s); I don’t remember when the anthology was published, but I’m going to guess a good bit before that (battered library hardcover?). I was into Asimov and possibly young Hitchcock at the time, if that helps any.

It Disappoints Me When Google Doesn’t Know Everything

*****

Oh great & wonderful Sars (and her merry band of bibliophiles):

My 11-year-old son came across a book in a large, well-known bookstore chain several months ago, and we haven’t been able to find it since. I’ve exhausted my Google-fu, and have stumped the local bookstore (of the same large, well-known chain) in our town. I’m hoping one of your readers may have seen it.

It’s not that old — it would have been released within the past year or two at the most, as I’m fairly sure it was in the new releases area of the kids’ section. It is a hardcover book with a red cover, wider than it is tall, and has a cartoon-ish picture of a boy with very faint fairy wings trapped inside a canning jar.

The Rugrat says that the book did NOT call the creatures fairies, but they were definitely fairy-like. All he remembers from the cover synopsis is that the creatures are “heavy as a brick” and that humans used them as fireworks. Any help finding this elusive book would be greatly appreciated.

Didn’t realize parenting required a degree in library sciences

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