By Jesse Cataldo

Most shows have a devoted fanbase, but it’s hard to imagine that such a thing exists for “Most Extreme Elimination Challenge.”

The show, which has its season premiere on Spike TV Friday night, is entering its fifth season, which means that someone is watching. But “MXC,” as it refers to itself, is more the type of thing that you repeatedly stumble upon than something you prepare for.

A ridiculous Japanese game show made over into an American comedy, it’s perfect for late-night channel surfing or a room full of drunk guys for whom 30 minutes of crotch-hits and people falling off of things is the perfect entertainment. It’s the sort of thing you can’t believe you’re almost enjoying, yet, like a little burr attached to your shirt, you leave it – it’s not doing you any harm and hey, it’s kind of cute.

It makes sense that “MXC” airs on Spike TV, the so-called channel for men, since it combines two venerable stand-bys of male fixation – horribly dubbed Asian dialogue and hilarious injuries. Of course, it’s not as dumb as it sounds. Firmly supporting by our generation’s rule of leaving no ironic possibility untouched, the show twists itself around into a tongue-in-cheek satire with two comedians replacing the original dialogue.

The comedians act in character as the original hosts, giving serious commentary that’s rife with entendre, innuendo and underhanded jokes. It’s usually pretty funny, but the whole thing seems no more than a flimsy pretext for the show’s real draw – endless shots of contestants falling.

And fall they do. The show whose footage we’re seeing, known as Takashi’s Castle, aired from 1985 to 1990. The contestants face four challenges, each requiring them to run across moving objects over pools of water. Most of them fail miserably, and the spills they take are monumental in the genre of unintentional physical comedy. We see contestants trip, flip and crash, landing face-down on artificial rocks or tumbling into water that looks dangerously shallow.

The fifth season of the show bills itself as being even more extreme, which is another joke since the show is exactly the same as it has been for four years. Fortunately, it’s unlikely that many people will be complaining – the best feature of having no fanbase may be that there’s no one there to get tired of you.

GRADE: B-