"El Pico" was the most successful of a swathe of films about drug addiction and juvenile delinquency that came out of Spain in the late '70s and early '80s. Despite its success it was also one of the last movies Eloy de la Iglesia made, as he succumbed to the same addiction as his characters.
"El Pico" (translated as "The Needle") centres around a young man in the Basque country in Bilbao, northern Spain. He is the son of a policeman, apparently a militaristic arm of the fascist government. His mother is dying of cancer.
The young man, named Paco, has a best friend, named Urko, whose father is a left wing politician who is agitating for Basque autonomy. Both boys are heroin addicts who start to deal drugs to pay for their habit. They visit an Argentine prostitute, and their dealer has a pregnant wife whose baby is soon born with heroin withdrawal. This leads to an extraordinary scene where the mother places the baby's pacifier in its mouth covered with heroin to stop it from crying.
The boys' addiction gets worse, and their lives predictably spiral out of control, leading to violence and death.
The movie is markedly less homoerotic than de la Iglesia's previous works, excepting some unnecessary and exploitative full frontal nudity. The last two de la Iglesia films I watched, "Cannibal Man" and "No One Heard the Scream", both featured eroticism only between the male lead and a superfluous handsome male character who opened the door to homosexuality, but de la Iglesia didn't take us through. Well, "El Pico" has an openly gay character - unlike those two movies - but also unlike them, this character isn't attractive at all; he resembles an anemic Marty Feldman with his huge eyes and angular face. He is, however, about the only compassionate figure in the movie.
It is hard to avoid comparisons with that German druggie movie, "Christiane F.", though the creator of the notorious video nasty "Cannibal Man" wasn't able to pull off a single scene which is anywhere near as harrowing as that film. For all its grit, it also doesn't feel as realistic; some of the twists and turns seem forced, and the ending still showcases de la Iglesia's habit of a final, unlikely development, here apparently trying to conflate drug use with being a policeman (?).
Lastly, I think the actors who play the two boys should have been switched. Urko, actually a minor character, is portrayed by a performer with more charisma and screen presence than the scruffy and sullen Paco. He also evinces far more sympathy from the audience; the camera loves him, and seeing him in Paco's role could have made "El Pico" a minor classic in league with "Christiane F.".
