Early last February, Limeños scrambled for a place in line to buy a ticket for the world premiere of Saicomanía, a documentary about Los Saicos – one of Peru’s earliest and most influential rock-n-roll bands. As an added plus, the three surviving band members – all now 65 years old – played a short set after the screening. Documentary co-producer José Beramendi said that the 220-seat theater sold out in a mere 40 minutes.

The U.S. premiere of Saicomanía will take place right here in San Francisco, when local Colectivo Cinema Errante hosts the doc at Artists’ Television Access on Sunday, May 29.

Los Saicos emerged in 1964 and lasted just two years. Their career was short-lived but plenty memorable. They were an unconventional, wild group of friends from Lince, a working-class barrio in Lima who held James Dean and Elvis as their idols and belonged to Los Cometas, a neighborhood gang named after ‘50s American rock-n-roll legend Bill Haley & His Comets.

Soon after forming Los Saicos, rumors spread that singer Erwin Flores and guitarist Rolando “Chino” Carpio ate raw human flesh, and that drummer Pancho Guevara had been known to play his drums with a hammer and make girls take off their clothes with his beats.

“Los Saicos’ effect on the public was totally different from that of other bands of the time,” Guevara said. “We provoked fear.”

But they were also a smashing success. They produced six 45-inch records and appeared on just about every radio and TV station in Lima before pulling the plug in 1966.

Carpio made his own guitar from scratch and the band hooked their instruments up to amplifiers, meant for broadcasting announcements over factory loudspeakers, borrowed from Flores’ father’s electronics store.

“It was really difficult to put together a band with equipment,” Flores explained. “That was very decisive.”

Today, Los Saicos are hailed by many as los abuelos of punk rock – not because the music they played resembled the punk sound that emerged in the late 70s and early 80s, but because they were among the first to establish a band of non-musicians, create simple, three-cord songs, and scream rather than sing their lyrics.

“The singer sounds like he gargles with razor blades,” says John Holstrom, co-founder of Punk Magazine, one of the earliest publications dedicated to the genre. “[Punk rock] is what rock-n-roll bands do with the first record, when they don’t know what they’re doing.”

Unbeknown to Los Saicos, they – much like their U.S. contemporaries The Sonics and MC 5 – were sparking a new wave of loud, defiant, do-it-yourself backyard bands later referred to as garage rock, then surf and punk rock.

But Los Saicos were innovators in another sense, too: They were among the first to begin composing rock music in Spanish. Soon thereafter, Peru became one of the three most influential centers of roc-en-español in the Americas, together with Mexico and Argentina.

Los Saicos fell into obscurity for many years until rock’n’roll aficionados began digging through dusty archives and rediscovering their music in the mid-2000’s.

Peruvian label Repsychled Records reissued their songs for the first time in CD form in 2006, which was followed by another CD on Madrid-based Munster Records in 2010. Saicomanía is the first and, so far, only documentary to bring Los Saicos back to life on screen.

The U.S. premiere of Saicomanía on Sunday, May 29th, also includes music videos by contemporary bands from Peru, Argentina and Spain influenced by Los Saicos as well as all-vinyl DJ sets by Sonido Franko. 7:30 p.m., Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia St., S.F. (415) 824-3890, $6.