In an "Avengers"-style super-teaming of the area's most adventurous cinema enthusiasts, the Boston Underground Film Festival, Wicked Queer and Strictly Brohibited have joined forces to present a 35mm screening of 1994's woefully underseen anarchist eco-satire "Fresh Kill" this Friday, Sept. 13 with director Shu Lea Cheang in attendance.

The Brattle Theatre is the first stop on a monthlong, 20-city barnstorming tour for Cheang and this new restoration of her eerily prophetic, semi-apocalyptic 1994 farce, a movie both very funny and deadly serious in its presentation of a world polluted by poisoned fish and an even more toxic mass media. The manic, channel-surfing structure of the 30-year-old film mirrors modern attention spans, with tacky advertising and proto-reality TV talk show freak-fests intruding on a conspiracy of corporate malfeasance. To watch it today is to realize that the more things have changed, the more they've stayed the same. And not in a good way.

"Fresh Kill" has all the hallmarks of a contemporary cult classic, but for a long time was an extremely difficult film to find. Strictly Brohibited screening series co-founder, local artist and Brattle projectionist Alex Kittle has been aching to show it ever since encountering a not-entirely-legal copy a couple of years ago, calling it "wonderfully strange, refreshingly queer sci-fi that manages to be both eerily prescient and extremely of its time. We're so excited it's been restored on a beautiful 35mm print for new audiences to discover."

This new print is the key component of Cheang's tour, the filmmaker insisting in the press notes that "all screenings will embrace vintage 35mm projectors -- a subtle if not poetic questioning of our surrendering our fates to overlording algorithms and the dictatorship of the digital."

I'll confess, it took this critic a second viewing to really wrap my head around everything Cheang is trying to do here. "Fresh Kill" comes at you fast. Named after a massive landfill located in Staten Island, the film follows Claire and Shareen, a lesbian couple played by Erin McMurtry and "Mississippi Masala" star Sarita Choudhury, whose daughter disappears after eating irradiated fish. The action revolves around a hip sushi bar named Naga Saki, where slick yuppies spout numbers and meaningless slogans instead of having conversations, and the suave chef moonlights as a computer hacker, wreaking havoc with multiple rotary phones and old dial-up modem.

The cool new craze is for everyone to eat fish lips, even if this sometimes causes them to turn a glowing green color and speak in electronically altered gibberish. Claire's mother Mimi (Laurie Carlos) is a daytime talk show host investigating the disappearance of hundreds of pets who have been eating the Sea Wonder brand cat food, a product of the GX corporation. Another television reporter (Paul Schulze, who went on to play Father Phil on "The Sopranos") dies in a mysterious accident after sniffing around the same company, but "Fresh Kill" has no interest whatsoever in following conventional thriller beats.

The movie instead intends to bombard you with images and ideas in an early approximation of the then-nascent information age. Cheang got a degree in cinema studies from NYU but has worked mainly as a multimedia installation artist. Her pioneering web project "Brandon" was the first internet art commissioned by the Guggenheim, and despite being made back in the days when everyone still used AOL, "Fresh Kill" feels more engaged with online life than movies conceived decades later. Characters find themselves constantly interrupted by nonsense memes like "BOYCOTT TOILET PAPER" ("What brand?" wonders the sushi chef) and the plot progresses like you've got multiple tabs open at once.

There's a climate catastrophe in process but nobody pays it much mind, with a skyline ringed by low-res red clouds and snowfalls of soap flakes barely commented upon. Yet Cheang's doomsday screed has a sexy, playful energy -- "Fresh Kill" has hands-down the hottest erotic encounter I've seen during which one of the participants is playing the accordion -- and there's some delightful wordplay nestled in the background gags. (My favorite is a neon sign that alternates between "Kiss," "Kill" and "Ki$$.")

There's more than a whiff of early Godard in the way characters spout statistics and read poetry directly to the camera, and Cheang has enlisted some New York art world icons as self-effacing walk-ons. See if you can spot performance artist Karen Finley as an unlikely housewife, or theater legend George C. Wolfe as a cat fancier. The film's screenwriter Jessica Hagedorn has a cameo as a street-table bookseller, working in a plug for her own novel "Dogeaters" while trying to interest passersby in "some French porn from the revered Olympia Press."

Cheang crams so damn much into the film's rapid-fire 80 minutes that there's no way it can all cohesively tie together, but "Fresh Kill" comes a lot closer than you might expect. The movie's most cutting, climactic observation is how evil goes unpunished in the modern world, it's occasionally just forced to rebrand. The place peddling poison fish switches from sushi to a Caribbean menu -- Naga Saki becomes Mumbo Gumbo -- while other lethal products are merely repackaged from a new-sounding company with an allegedly eco-friendly message, even though they're all still selling the same contaminated crap. Like I said, the more things change.