Last night, Alamo Drafthouse once again proved how terrific a new cultural asset it is for San Francisco, hosting the local premiere of a restored (and reviled!) print of John Waters's early, trashy masterwork, Multiple Maniacs. It's not likely that too many of you who aren't Waters superfans have seen the film — Waters says it last screened in San Francisco at the Palace Theater, home of the Cockettes, in 1970, and after a brief run in a couple midnight-movie houses it basically disappeared. And it made it onto VHS in 1994 in the wake of the successes of Hairspray and Serial Mom, but you're lucky if you ever got to see a copy unless you were a devotee of Le Video or a similarly well stocked video outlet, and it's never made it to DVD. But that may be changing now that it's gotten the Criterion Collection treatment with restored digital print now in a limited theatrical release.

Waters was in the house Friday evening at the recently restored New Mission Theater, and spoke from the stage about the joy of seeing his rarely screened film — the one that he's said is his personal favorite of all his films. "The most hilarious thing to me is the Janus Films logo," he says, referring to the high-art film distributor and owner of the Criterion Collection label which has been the keeper of the great works of Bergman, Antonioni, and the rest. "It's like the greatest, most amazing irony of my life right now," Waters said with a smile.

He said the Criterion people asked him, "'Do you want us to restore the original exactly how it looked in 16 millimeter, with all the scratches and dust?' And I said, 'No! Are you insane? I didn't want it to look like that. That was just the best we could do at the time!"

The resulting cut of the film, in black and white, is indeed beautiful to look at, and depicts a frosty, occasionally snowy Baltimore in the late fall of 1969, and the youthful faces of Waters's acting company known as the Dreamlanders, Mink Stole, Mary Vivian Pearce, David Lochary, and Divine herself. Quips Waters, "It now looks exactly as it always should have: like a bad Cassavetes film."

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

The film, which was Waters's second feature film after Mondo Trasho, opens with a ridiculous, over-the-top Watersian freakshow called the "The Cavalcade of Perversion" — all set up in several dime-store tents on the lawn outside Waters's actual parents' home. (He also explained before the screening that they shot Edith Massey in the tiny bar where she actually worked at the time, and Lady Divine's apartment in the film is actually Waters's own apartment, exactly as it was furnished in 1969, complete with a poster of the 1968 Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor bomb Boom!.)

The "Calvacade" consists of various performers doing things designed to disgust a group of pearl-clutching suburbanites, who nonetheless line up to see the show, including two bearded "queers" making out, a "puke eater," a heroin addict going through withdrawals, and a woman making out with a bicycle seat.

Enter Lady Divine, the star of the show, who appears in a Bergman-esque first shot, shot from behind lounging nude in her white tent with two shirtless boys beside her, her face only visible in a hand mirror. It's a gloriously ironic and artful sequence by the ambitious young Waters, and perhaps should be considered the true debut of the larger-than-life drag character Divine would go on to portray in four more Waters classics.

The show is of course just a ruse to entrap and rob the naive suburbanites, and what follows is a ridiculous and often massively funny send-up of art-house films of the era, with a lesbian sexual encounter in a church — including an infamous "rosary job" from seductress Mink Stole — leads to a dramatization of New Testament scenes including Jesus feeding the multitude (depicted here with a loaf of sliced white bread and a can of tuna suddenly multiplying after a puff of smoke), Jesus's betrayal by Judas, with Edith Massey (I think) as a bewildered looking Mary Magdalene.

There is, after a totally stupid number of murders in Divine's apartment, a truly unexpected, completely non-sequitor sequence in which Divine — real or imagined? — gets raped by a giant lobster, and then proceeds on a crazed, destructive rampage through the city. Almost none of this makes sense, but the sheer audacity and high-art parody of it all makes it clear why Waters considers this film his favorite.

"I'm so happy that you're all getting to see this film, in this way, finally," Waters said last night. "And I know Edith, and Divine, and everyone is happy you're seeing it too."

Multiple Maniacs plays at Alamo Drafthouse Sunday at 9:40 p.m. and Wednesday at 2:20 p.m., with more screenings possibly TBA.

Update: The film is also screening at the Castro Theatre at 7 and 11 p.m. on September 16, 2016. Get tickets here.