Forget about Clerks II. If you desire a great movie about a guy who serves food and insults, then you must instead see Matt Mahurin's I Like Killing Flies, a documentary that is more hilarious and more genuinely sweet than anything in Kevin Smith's latest celebration of inanity. Surely you will find more enjoyment from a celebration of originality, anyway, and Flies delivers a wonderful showcase of a more positive kind of nonconformity.

The movie presents Kenny Shopsin, a foul-mouthed yet lovable iconoclast who presides over and prepares the 900-plus (yes, 900-plus!) menu items at Shopsin's, a small breakfast-and-lunch joint he opened over thirty-five years ago with his wife, Eve, in New York's West Village. Originally a corner general store that gradually gained popularity for its take-out sandwiches, Shopsin's became a full-on restaurant in 1982, at which time Kenny's strict set of rules was likely put into place to keep his business from getting out of control. These rules include no more take-out, no suits (aka yuppie-scum), no cell phones, no indecisiveness, no ordering a dish someone else has ordered (that moment or that day), no sitting if you're not eating, no parties of five or more (and no pretending you're a party of three and a party of two), no appealing any of the rules, and no surprise if Kenny makes a new rule for you on the spot. Anyone breaking or attempting to break these rules, even if ignorant of them, risk being banned from Shopsin's for life.

That description may have you imagining "The Soup Nazi" from Seinfeld, but even though Kenny might be discriminative, rude, confrontational, outspoken and at times insensitive -- for anyone who's offended by or unhappy with Shopsin's customer service, Kenny says, "F*ck 'em" -- he still comes across as someone you want to be friends with, and maybe even give a big hug. All things considered, he's never entirely unreasonable: He just wants his customers to prove to him that they're okay to feed, and all they have to do is be as genuine as he is.

For those who are fit to be served, Kenny is like a culinary Santa Claus (even if he is a self-proclaimed "fat, old, nasty Jew"), except that his gifts aren't free and he doesn't travel the world with them. But gifts they are, like food from the Gods, at least as far as I can tell from those who've eaten there. Each item is famously inventive, made from scratch, and not necessarily always cooked the same way, or filled with the same ingredients as the last time you ordered it. These risks aside, however, many regulars have regular dishes -- some of them specially made and not on the menu -- and if Kenny has forgotten the cashews in the Patsy's Cashew Chicken, he's likely to come out of the kitchen with a handful of the nuts, and drop them in.

When, in the summer of 2002, Shopsin's was forced to move out of its cozy spot and relocate down the street, it was the restaurant's loyal clientele that helped Kenny and Eve and their five children make the change, whether with financial assistance, volunteer work or simply moral support. Mahurin, an artist and former music video director who has been a regular for decades, was asked to take some pictures of the old place before it closed. Going a step further, he decided to make a movie.

I Like Killing Flies is the unfortunately titled result, and considering Kenny's distaste for publicity and his constant references to the movie as Mahurin's "art project," it probably wasn't originally intended for theatrical release. The film is crude and intimate, a simple document of the Shopsins at work and in transition. Most of its footage consists of claustrophobic close-ups of Kenny in his tiny kitchen, with Mahurin's hand in frame, holding a little microphone to his subject's face. As he cooks his eclectic dishes (such as macaroni and cheese pancakes), Kenny offers up some priceless monologues, holding forth about everything from politics to sex, with no phrasing too racy or inappropriate, in his opinion, to be overheard in the dining room. One moment he is describing the consistency of raw egg whites as being similar to the fluids found in parts of the female anatomy, and later he's comparing the excitement of experimenting with ingredients to "sticking your dick in the wrong hole." But Kenny is not just crass, and he's certainly not immature; he simply speaks his mind, and a lot of incredible things come out of his mouth in the course of the movie's 72 minutes.

Other highlights include Kenny's appreciation for fly-swatting, both literally and figuratively (hence the movie's title), his fighting with his kids and his customers, his and Eve's sampling patrons' leftovers in order to discover their faults (if the customer left it over, there must be something wrong with it) and, of course, confessions from his regular, first-time and would-be patrons. And, sprinkled throughout the documentary are descriptions and pictures of many of Kenny's concoctions that are scrumptiously tempting, mind-numbingly bewildering or, intriguingly, both. Actually, there hasn't been a movie this mouth-watering since Big Night displayed the finer examples of Italian cuisine ten years ago. The difference with Flies, though, is that it is a work of non-fiction, and you can actually visit and, depending on your luck, even eat at the restaurant in question.

Unfortunately, Shopsin's is currently closed for vacation (and may even be relocating again soon), so viewers catching the movie during its exclusive run at New York's Cinema Village will have to wait a few weeks to partake of the restaurant's unconventional offerings of food and atmosphere. And even then, who knows -- Kenny might have a new rule against touristy new customers looking for a first-hand experience of what they've seen on screen.