It's an outrageous gore comedy, with decapitation, zombies, bad puns and stupid character names. People can get punched from one side of a field to the other, land like a rocket and then have their gravestone pop up.

What's more, Misaki wanted to watch it with me. She enjoyed it. She's six years old. What's more, she used to be frightened of the television. David Attenborough nature documentaries, Laurel & Hardy, any title sequence at all... she couldn't take any of them. This morning, though, she got up as usual at 6am, ate breakfast and then chose to watch this. She double-checked a couple of times that "this isn't real", but I think she already knew the answer. This film includes:

(a) the immortal Tak Sakaguchi. He appears in the most ridiculous films and makes them awesome. The guy's a star. Before being discovered by the film industry, he was an underground street fighter and he performs his own stunts in his films. This isn't his funniest performance, but he's still perfect for it and embracing the ridiculous tone. I laughed aloud when he delivers a hammily emotional tribute to his dead brother, for instance, then throws the corpse into the air to get on with a fight scene. I suspect Misaki might be interested in more Tak Sakaguchi films, although none of them are age-suitable for her.

(b) a teacher who grabs a sword off the wall when going to sort out students.

(c) a zombie baseball team who dismember their opponents while terrifying the umpire into saying whatever they want. They deny even the concept of rules. They wrap barbed wire around their bats. Mind you, their coach will bite off your ear if you try to commit murder off the baseball field, because that's less fun.

(d) a baseball-hating mother who carries a warhammer and is probably a gravel-voiced man in drag. Neither Misaki nor I were entirely sure on the latter, but just the sight of him/her made me laugh aloud.

(e) sports manga cliches, e.g. friendship lectures and emotional reconciliations after which the entire school turns up to applaud.

(f) a poison bat in the arse.

(g) the protagonist's tears can resurrect people who've been machine-gunned. While making the sun come out. Mind you, returning from the dead is routine in this film and just means you're a badass. "I thought you died!" "I did, but I returned to life!" Sometimes this involves cyber-converting the dead and putting a cuckoo clock in his chest.

(h) parents, sons and brothers who don't recognise each other even after they've been punching each other through walls. No, they're not in disguise. They're just dim.

(i) ridiculous names, e.g. Matsui Gorilla. Tak Sakaguchi's character is named after a 17th century samurai, Yagyuu Juubei Mitsuyoshi, while being a pun on the Japanese word for baseball (yakyuu).

Baseball content is minimal, except when parodying sports manga. Sakaguchi can deliver a fastball that catches fire in mid-air, while actual matches will be a battlefield. Pure slaughter. As you've probably gathered, this film is ridiculous. A six-year-old girl knew not to take it seriously. It's a cult film in the West, of course. Japan went through a phase of making lots of stupid over-the-top cartoonish gore films, often by people like Noboru Iguchi and Yudai Yamaguchi (who made this one). Many of them are dumb and unfunny, but this is one of the good ones.

This film has a loose 2011 remake, Deadball, again starring Sakaguchi. I'll review that tomorrow, but I prefer this original.