The studio that acquired the rights to this thriller didn’t have much fate in the US audience’s knowledge of the English vocabulary. The film’s original title The Clairvoyant was thus changed to The Killing Hour. Apart from that, director Armand Mastroianni’s movie doesn’t test the viewer’s cognitive abilities too much since it is a pretty straightforward crime thriller. It begins with several murders where the unknown killer ties his victims with handcuffs and either kills them actively or watches them die in situations they can’t possibly escape. Virna, a woman skilled at painting, has visions of these murders and assists the police investigation and is also a person of interest for a fame-seeking tv show host who covers the murders. Despite the premise, the movie isn’t filled with a lot of murders throughout its runtime but rather a dialog-heavy “whodunit” that doesn’t manage to create an atmosphere of constant danger.

The US DVDs by Anchor Bay and Blue Underground (which is probably just a repack of the former) both state in their descriptions that they feature a “never-before seen uncensored Director’s Cut”. When we compared that DVD to the German VHS by distributor VCL (who named the film American Killing), we noticed censorship that it uses harmless alternate footage in one scene. This is atypical for German censorship and suggests that the German release has a censored US version as its basis.

Compared are the German FSK 18 VHS (by VCL) and the US-DVD (by Blue Underground).

1 scene with alternate material = 0.4 sec.