Hollywood Film tackles rare Mercritis Condition

all of these attempts at viral marketing/advertising are lost on this utterly unwatchable film.

you've lost all credibility on the site and to audiences in general by attempting to skew the IMDB ratings (which are supposed to be genuine feedback by individual viewers collated through the web--representing a democratic rating of the film by normal people rather than professional movie critics).

the vote fixing was obvious as when i first watched the film 2-3 months ago it had a rating of 7.7. when i looked at the rating again yesterday it was down to 5.1, and now it's down to 5.0. no film undergoes that drastic of a drop in ratings unless some kind of vote-stuffing was in practice.

luckily, IMDB has safeguards against vote-stuffing through their weighting system in addition to the democratic nature of the site. you can only fake so many votes with a limited amount of time and resources. and as more and more people cast their votes, the significance of the vote fraud decreases until eventually its skewing effect on the final rating only makes a marginal difference. ultimately, it's pointless to try to skew the ratings as IMDB has such a large user base that the community will eventually drown out any such attempts by sheer numbers.

astroturfing on the forums is even more pathetic. there will always be a few people who like even the worst of films, but when people start coming on here and post rave reviews about this mediocre comedy claiming that it's the second coming of christ, their obvious intentions of creating buzz and their interest in promoting the film become transparent to most people.

there's quite a bit of difference between astroturfing and viral marketing. if you have to resort to astroturfing by paying or bribing people, then your film is probably not good enough to stand on its own legs. viral marketing is when you gain popular exposure for a film by means other than conventional advertising--this primarily entails using word of mouth to spread word of the film. however, viral marketers don't have to bribe people to astroturf for them because a good product will sell itself through genuine audience endorsement--this is obviously not the case here.

it's understandable if an indie director/producer struggles a bit on their first film, but astroturfing is destroys all credibility/integrity the makers of this film had. obviously they spent more time/effort on trying to sell this flick than on writing the script or shooting. going to such lengths to astroturf (money which could have been better spent or just saved if the film had any merit of its own) suggests that making money and commercial success was the primary goal of the film, and not art or entertainment.

i will never watch another film by this director or the producers of this film, not because i didn't enjoy this film (everyone deserves a second chance, especially someone new to a field), but because of their underhanded method of trying to promote their film. i'm only gonna keep an eye on the filmmakers to warn people about any future releases by them, and also to see how low the rating on this film will drop--because i'm pretty sure it'll continue to fall far below 5.0.