Which is worse: Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey?

In a comment to my post yesterday on Fifty Shades of Grey, Kyle asked the important question that is the title of this entry.  In my response to him, I copped out and declared the two a tie. 

That's clearly not good enough.  If I'm going to besmirch not just one but two movies based on books that millions and millions of people love, I ought to be willing to face the tough questions.  The only fair way to do this is to compare key points of the movies. 

Length:  Twilight clocks in at 2:02, while Fifty Shades piles on an extra three minutes and hits 2:05.  With movies this bad, every extra minute is a lash from an incompetent dominant, so Fifty Shades is the worse on this front.

Plot:  Sure, both are stupid beginnings to inane trilogies, but because the question is about only these first movies--and those are all I've seen--we have to restrict the comparison to just what happens in these two.  In Fifty Shades, we have a boring love story that makes no sense at any turn, but few film love stories do.  In Twilight, we have sparkly vampires and werewolves who imprint on their love-mates and, well, you get the point:  Twilight carries far and away the worse plot. 

Acting:  Assume here that we must use this term for the performances in the films; don't grouse at me that no one acted at all.  I'm going to stick to the two leads in each case.  In Fifty Shades, we have Jamie Dornan doing his best impression of a sad gray sofa in a Bronx heroin den, but at least you can tell it's a sofa.  In Twilight, Robert Pattinson manages to be nearly invisible, even while sparkling, in a performance so bad I believe my memory actually contains blanks spots where he should be.  Similarly, Kristen Stewart's only acting achievement in Twilight was to piss off all sensible viewers, while I have to grant that Dakota Johnson had two whole acting moves and was frequently recognizable as human.  For worse acting, Twilight wins going away. 

Creepy factor:  Mid-twenties billionaire Grey falls for boring woman something like five years younger (no, I'm not willing to research the exact difference), and definitely out of college.  Yeah, he's supposed to be a dominant, but his few kink acts are so tame that you'd find more sexual heat in Julia Child dressing a chicken.  In Twilight, Pattinson is over a hundred years old and becomes infatuated with a high-schooler.  Twilight once again wins by a mile. 

I could go on, but I believe the answer to Kyle's question is abundantly clear:  Twilight is far and away the worse of the two movies. 

Sad movie testimony

So far this trip, we've watched four movies, all of which we had at least some reason to believe might be decent (or better):

Attack Girls Swim Team Vs. the Undead
Pathfinder
Twilight
The Zombie Diaries

The middle two played in theaters all over the U.S. The first is, as you might expect, Japanese, and the last is British.

Of these, the best, and the only one I can in any way recommend, is Attack Girls. Though low-budget, nonsensical, and frequently offensive on multiple fronts, it nonetheless has a pulsing weird rhythm that at times leaves you saying "WTF?!?" in a mostly good way.

Pathfinder was dark and hard to follow and way too predictable, though its transformation at the end into a quasi/proto feminist statement was something we had actually believed so stupid that we were (incorrectly) sure the film would avoid it.

Zombie Diaries was simply dull, a Blair Witch zombie flick with little style or terror to redeem it.

Which leaves, of course, Twilight, easily the biggest hit of the group. I know a lot of people liked it a great deal, but really, it sucked. Pouty girl you can't like meets pouty boy who looks like a girl and who is also unlikeable. Everyone thinks they're hot. They end up together, their love too intense for words or even a kiss. Many people get hurt. Not for one second in this movie did I care at all for any of the characters or find it in any way interesting. The only things that kept me going were our group's constant moans and laughter and the (incorrect) belief that surely it couldn't be this bad.

I'm definitely hoping the next crop of DVDs will be better. I can blame only myself, however, because, amazingly, I own all of these. Yikes!