EXPLOSION OF A MOTOR CAR (1900)
Article 4098 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-5-2012
Directed by Cecil M. Hepworth
Featuring Cecil M. Hepworth, Henry Lawley
Country: UK
What it is: Black comedy

An overcrowded motor car explodes on a city street, leaving a local policeman with the unpleasant job of sorting out the mess afterwards.

This movie dovetails nicely with yesterday’s movie. Once again, the movie isn’t a horror movie; exploding motor cars don’t automatically qualify as horror, or else I’d have to contend with ninety percent of the action movies ever made for this project. But since the explosion results in the blowing to pieces of the passengers (with a sequence in which the body parts rain down from the sky), we find ourselves immersed in another common horror theme in much the same way that the decapitation in yesterday’s movie did. Granted, this movie plays it less for horror and more for black comedy, especially as the annoyed policeman sorts through the body parts to figure which part goes with which. This may make the movie one of the earliest black comedies in existence, and I did find myself both appalled and amused at the same time.