I’ve seen some pretty awful posters in my time, but this one for the PG-13 rated version of “The King’s Speech” takes the cake for sheer barf-worthiness, not to mention greed and chutzpah. Having conned the idiots at the movie rating board into revising the original R rating by dropping out the sound in the scene where Colin Firth’s George VI utters a string of F-bombs in a strictly non-sexual context, the Weinstein Co. is trying to squeeze a few more bucks out of the now-artistically compromised Oscar winner (which has sold more than $130 million worth of tickets in North America alone) by hawking it as “the family movie of the year” with an poster that looks like it was designed by a high schooler using Photoshop and a vintage British marmalade ad as inspiration.

I was thinking of revising my own rating for the pointless PG-13 version of “The King’s Speech,” and seeing this nauseating ad pushed me over the edge. So the movie, which I awarded four stars (our highest rating) to in its R-rated cut, is now officially dropped to 3 stars if you insist on see the PG-13 version (which wasn’t, understandably, screened for critics).

Not that I think the family values crowd is going to be rushing out see to this one — the Weinsteins’ notorious English-language version of the Italian “Life is Beautiful” flopped. Kids aren’t going to be conned into a seeing a movie about the British royal family even if the poster replaces Oscar-nominated Geoffrey Rush with more photogenic child actress who briefly plays Princess Margaret (the future reputed lover of Mick Jagger and Peter Sellers, among many others). At least a slightly less cheesy version running in the New York Times today includes Margaret’s sister, the future Queen Elizabeth.

Just for the record, “The King’s Speech” can have my four-star rating back when the R-rated version arrives on DVD and Blu-ray on April 19.