Starring Henry G. Sanders and Kaycee Moore. Unrated. Plays Friday to Thursday, August 3 to 9 (except August 7), at the Vancity Theatre

It has taken 30 years for this legendary underground movie to become widely available. And although time has burnished both the aesthetic qualities of Killer of Sheep and its value as a time capsule for a long-gone era and mood, the poverty of its setting lingers on.

As many cinephiles know, the movie was made in 1977 as the graduating thesis for Charles Burnett at UCLA's film school. This was a decade before Spike Lee led a surge of black filmmakers. But where Do the Right Thing and Boyz n the Hood took Vincente Minnelli and Martin Scorsese as influences, the Italians that Burnett favoured were neorealists like Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini.

Killer's gritty black-and-white approach, with stark 16mm (now blown up to cleaner-looking 35mm), owes a lot to The Bicycle Thief and other postwar studies in dramatic naturalism. Burnett has had a difficult career (only 1990's To Sleep With Anger saw any small success), and later films contain little of the gentle lyricism evident in this almost plotless tale of poor folk scraping through in the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles about a dozen years after the infamous riots.

The dangerous construction sites and dusty lots where kids spend their time could be found in war zones like Beirut or Baghdad. But their battles are of a highly ritualized nature. Almost every encounter ends in tears or with threats of a worse whuppin' at the hands of beaten-down adults. The film's operative image, echoed at several junctures, is of a boy almost a man poking his head around a corner as "friends" throw rocks.

The neighbourhood on display is much like the Watts or South Central of today, minus the guns, hard drugs, and brand-name awareness.

That fatalism is best represented by the main character. Stan, played by Henry G. Sanders, is the father of two and husband of one very frustrated wife (impressive Kaycee Moore)as captured unforgettably when the couple dances to Dinah Washington's "This Bitter Earth". (The difficulty in clearing music rights to the soundtrack, drawn from every type of African-American music, is a central reason the movie never got commercial release.)

Stan works in a slaughterhouse (hence the title), but as a perennially worried insomniac, he's also a frequent, if unsuccessful, counter of sheep. His principle free-time activity appears to be helping a much poorer pal fix a ratty old car, although their efforts are mostly of the Laurel and Hardy variety. The humour is grim, the images stark, and the acting is often stilted. But the movie is a one-of-a-kind walk down America's hidden memory lane. Just watch out for the rocks.