Behavior of a ignited drum of gunpowder To get the immediate question out of the way: We were playing a Pen & Paper RPG and it "just happened".

Question
Take a 200 Liter Standard Steel Drum, fill it with gunpowder, remove the lid and tilt in on the side (open end towards your enemy).
Now take a torch and stick it in the open end.
What am I to expect to happen? Will the drum just splatter itself (and everyone nearby) over the walls or will it behave like a Solid-Rocket Booster and propel itself with great force against the wall, burning everyone who stands on the wrong side.
Assuming I have a chance to survive, which end should I actually point towards the enemy for greatest damage?

Backstory
Longer explanation of Why do you want to know this?!?:
We were playing a round of the Cthulhu Pep&Paper RPG set during WW1. Our Gamemaster provided us with some drums full of gunpowder (though he failed to explain exactly why someone would store gunpowder in Oil-barrels or how they got there). Soon after we faced a big bad boss. We remembered the barrels and decided to weaponize them as kind of last chance weapon. We put every big metal chunk we carried (notably 3 first World-War folding shovels) in the open end, tilted the drum and ignited it. After 10 minutes heated discussion we settled for the SRB-Theory, which coincidentally also ensured our survival (though not unharmed of course). The boss faced burning gunpowder and three shovels... quite literally.
We asked ourselves afterwards what would actually happen and if we even had a remote chance of surviving.
 A: It's a balance between deflagration (rate of burning of a flame front through a mass of propellent ) and detonation (a form  of combustion in which a supersonic exothermic front accelerating through a medium that eventually drives a shock front propagating directly in front of it). From: Wikipedia: Detonation 
And depends this in turn depends on the powder composition  size of granules and a host of other factors.
So although I am as far from a rocket scientist as you can get, I would guess, for a tiny fraction of a second, you might have a rocket, this depends on the ratio of thrust to mass as regards how far it it travels, then you have a bomb.
From Gunpowder Burn Rates:
This is a very comprehensive article in which the author tests burn rates of various powders.

For deflagration to continue in a powder granule, the burning surface must communicate heat to the underlying layers and raise their temperature to the ignition point, continuing the burning process until the granule is consumed. In a solid granule, heat can be transferred by two processes, conduction and radiation. Conduction is the direct transfer of heat through actual contact (like picking up a hot object), while radiation is the transfer of heat across a transparent medium (like the warm feeling coming from sitting near a campfire). Because a black powder granule is not at all transparent, we are left with conduction (although in smokeless powder there can be some heat transfer through radiation).

To answer your question as to which way you should point it, the blunt end should be pointed towards the target, and you should be at the fuse end. As to where to position yourself, far, far away, with a very long ignited stick, would seem to be recommended.
