Kirk Cameron posted a couple photos to Facebook to illustrate

Kirk Cameron is determined to save Christmas, but can he save his movie from the Tomatometer? The Christian film star noticed last week that the website Rotten Tomatoes, which collates critic and audience ratings of films, was showing a “rotten” score for his new movie Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas. In an effort to get Saving Christmas into the “fresh” zone, he instructed his followers on Facebook to rate the movie themselves and “send the message to all the critics that WE decide what movies we want our families to see!” (h/t to Uproxx for the story.) As Uproxx points out, Cameron’s directive to “storm the gates of Rotten Tomatoes” was a little disingenuous, considering that audience ratings are open to anyone who signs up for a free account.

If you’ve spent any time online, you can guess what happened next. Cameron’s Facebook followers dutifully gave Saving Christmas five-star ratings, boosting its audience score to 94 percent. Within a day, internet users outside of Kirk Cameron’s network started noticing what was happening, and began submitting their own votes. “The haters and atheists are coming out of the woodwork, attempting to hammer your good work (they rallied to drop your rating super low),” Cameron wrote in a follow-up post. Because when Kirk Cameron’s Facebook friends vote up the movie, they’re doing God’s work, but when other people voice their own opinions, it’s a “rally” of “haters?” Either way, it’s a violation of what sites like Rotten Tomatoes are trying to do, which is to inform movie audiences by compiling people’s honest reactions to movies. After all the noise, the audience rating for Saving Christmas is currently hovering around 30 percent.

The critics’ rating, meanwhile, remains unaffected by the kerfuffle, and has stayed consistent at 8 percent. Despite Cameron’s us-versus-them rhetoric, most critics have reacted to Saving Christmas with a resounding “eh,” saying that the film is poorly made and lacks broad appeal. “As a movie, Saving Christmas is not good,” writes The Austin Chronicle’s Kimberley Jones. “But as a teaching aid for congregants about having their fruitcake and eating it, too? Sure, why not. Go nuts, guys.”

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Photo credit: Facebook