Film reviewers take note: the Internet hath no fury like a Batman fan scorned.

It’s a lesson some critics are learning thanks to furious online commentary — including death threats — in response to less-than-kind reviews of The Dark Knight Rises, the highly-anticipated finale to Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy.

Reviewer Marshall Fine of the website Hollywood & Fine was the first to declare his dislike for the movie, calling it “tedious” and “lumpish” and comparing it to Michael Bay’s Transformers films. His review on Tuesday prompted the film’s score on review-aggregating site Rotten Tomatoes to fall below 100 per cent.

That’s when commenters struck. One person fantasized about beating Fine “with a thick rubber hose into a coma.” Another urged him to “die in a fire.” Others posted wittier criticism, quoting the movie’s villain Bane and saying Fine’s “punishment must be more severe.”

Related:Our Peter Howell reviews The Dark Knight Rises

Heavy traffic caused Fine’s website’s server to crash for hours on Tuesday afternoon.

Rotten Tomatoes responded to the vitriol by disabling comments on The Dark Knight Rises reviews “for a few days,” an unprecedented step. The site’s editor in chief Matt Atchity followed with a note titled “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” imploring that civility prevail.

“Just take a deep breath, step away from the computer, and maybe go for a walk,” it reads. “There are plenty of other things to get angry about, like war, famine, poverty and crime. But not movie reviews.”

Multiple lukewarm reviews besides Fine’s have since come in, including the Associated Press’s Christy Lemire’s two-star appraisal, and the film’s rating was down to 87 per cent as of early Wednesday afternoon. The Dark Knight, its 2008 predecessor, sits at 94 per cent.

The film opens on Friday, so until then, fans angry at less-than-stellar reviews who want to better understand what’s happening to them might want to take a look at this handy list.