Anyone who enjoys badly shot home video of Middle Americans embarrassing themselves is likely to be a fan of America's Funniest Home Videos, ABC's six-year-old hit show. Evidently, its premise is a winner: viewers contribute subject matter that's either cutesy (kiddies, pets, weddings) or sadistic (pratfalls, blunders, accidents), smothered in syrupy narration by comedian Bob Saget.

The show is dumb, but it certainly exploits the right medium: the couches of America are crammed with people hoping to see their neighbors humiliate themselves on TV. In that sense A.F.H.V. is a cynically inspired piece of programming. But why do we now need it on "interactive" CD-ROM?

The answer is, quite simply: we don't. This CD is so awful that it really doesn't deserve to be reviewed at all, except as an example of bad taste. So let's get to work.

While attempting to change amateur video from media into multimedia, this clunky disc employs the ever-popular "house" metaphor; viewers are encouraged to begin their explorations in the "Living Room," aka "couch-potato mode."

This viewing platform for 450-plus videos, cross-indexed by topic and title, seems innocuous at first. Then you discover that the quarter-screen, lo-res videos are only a few seconds long and disgraced by moronic, cartoon-style soundtracks. Even a viewer prepared for the meagerness of the clips will be dismayed to discover that they are shown on a "virtual TV screen" in a cheesy, animated living room, with the sneakers of a "virtual couch potato" propped on a coffee table in the foreground. The effect is ugly and depressing beyond belief.

The other two viewing modes - the "Editing Room" and the "Game Board" - are designed to allow players to insert the clips of their choice into any of 30 preset story lines (apparently this is how the word "interaction" made it into the title). These "stories" are so insultingly stupid and unfunny that it is best to omit any further discussion of them. Even the saccharine commentaries of Bob Saget (who wisely makes no appearance here) are less irritating than these pointless shells of narrative.

To be fair, some of the clips are funny - if you're the type who enjoys watching a wife hit her husband in the face with a golf club. (I certainly wrung some cruel thrills from the sequence of an overweight, middle-aged woman in a swimsuit falling off a rope swing and wallowing in the muddy shallows of the ol' swimmin' hole.) But why not drink this poison from its source - America's Funniest Home Videos is beamed into your home for free every Sunday night, and the videos fill the entire screen!