"A film about the Lower East Side of New York, an incisive documentary from the drug scene. Director Lech Kowalski spent four months living with the local junkies, gaining their trust, and then brought in the cameras. The junkies themselves are the leading actors and John Spacely is Gringo, who, with eye patch, black leather vests, earrings and silver hair serves as a native guide through hell on earth. The film spares us nothing. In it, the junkies' wretched existence is portrayed with shocking brutality, we meet them all, from drug debutants shooting their first heroin, normal junkies, floating junkies, sinking junkies and dead ones. There's disease, combat, hateful sex, violence and murder. The New York critic Barry Farber writes: ""GRINGO is gross. In a real sense, I think anyone who takes a 12-year-old to see it should be locked up for contributing to the dirty mind of a minor. Some of the contests are so utterly revulsifying I won't even paraphrase or hint around the outskirts. In a higher sense, though, I believe every 12-year-old in America should see it whether he wants to or not.

I think GRINGO has the power to vaccinate 12-year-olds against drug addiction. When germs are weak, weak medicine can knock them out when the germs get tougher, they have to come up with stronger antibiotics.

Sermons and lectures worked on me when I was 12. Now they need GRINGO. Did 1 like GRINGO? That's the wrong question. Ask me that when I walk out of a dream, a spy thriller or situation comedy. I hated GRINGO. But I think it can save America."""