- The owner of a prestigious New York ballet school teams up with a male model to solve a series of bizarre murders of a few of the students.
- A series of murders rock a dance academy in New York in which the mysterous directress, Candice, sets out to find the kiler, with a little assistance from a shady male model, named George, who has a hidden agenda for her as does she for him.—Anonymous
- At the Arts for the Living Center in New York, Candice Norman (Olga Karlatos) oversees the latest dance routine choreographed by Margie (Geretta Marie Fields). Candice tells Margie that the act needs even more perfection in preparation for a visit from three talent agents. The academy director Dick Gibson (Claudio Cassinelli) meets with TV producers Bob Steiner and John Morris, who watch a video of the dance, and Candice learns that the men will only select three dancers for an upcoming TV show. That evening after the dance class is over, one of the dancers, named Susan, is murdered in the locker room by an unseen person who chloroforms her and then stabs her in the heart with a long hair needle. Lieutenant Borges (Cosimo Cinieri) arrives on the scene to investigate. Also with Lt. Borges is the police profiler and psychotherapy professor Dr. Davis (Giuseppe Mannajuolo). With Candice nowhere to be found, suspicion begins to focus not only on her but on the victim's boyfriend Willy Stark (Christian Borromeo), as well as Dick Gibson.
At her apartment, Candice arrives where Dick pays her a visit where they talk about the potential relationships between the students, and that there is nothing going on between him and the other students. Bob the DJ phones Candice and updates her on the murder at the academy.
The next day, the group dances while Willy is upset that nobody seems to care about Susan's death. Meanwhile, Lt. Borges talks to Dick about a possible rivalry between the dancers. That evening at a local nightclub, Janice dances alone for an audience and then walks home, where Willy is sitting in her apartment wanting to talk. Janice goes to get a photo of Willy and Susan, but when she calls out to him, he is gone. Janice finds her pet canary dead with a hairpin needle through its body. Janice runs to the front door where she gets attacked and killed by the unseen killer with the hairpin needle to the heart.
Candice begins having nightmares of being attacked by a handsome young man (Ray Lovelock) wielding a long, ornamental needle identical to the one in the killings. Candice becomes more obsessed with the dream assailant when she sees an advertising billboard which features him prominently. Unable to shake the feeling that they are in some way determined to meet, Candice tracks down the man in the poster to the seedy Fulton Hotel, and bribes the desk clerk for the key to "Mr. Robinson's" room. She explores the room, but is shocked when the handsome model returns suddenly. The man introduces himself as George Webb, and to Candice's repulsion, is his a wreck, drunk, and disheveled. With what seems like disappointment along with terror, Candice flees from the room, leaving her purse and ID behind.
Meanwhile, Lt. Borges records a phone call to the police station of a person claiming be the killer. When a voice analyst identifies it as Bart, one of the dancers, Borges arrests him. Bart confesses to the phone calls as well as to killing Susan because she was crazy, and Janice because she was Hispanic. But Borges states his belief to Davis that Bart is not the killer, but a pathological liar.
George goes to the academy to return Candice's purse where another dancer, named Gloria, recognizes him from a modeling show they appeared in years earlier. Dick sees George and Candice on a security monitor and calls Borges saying that George must be the killer. At a local Chinese restaurant, Candice and George become more close when she tells him about an incident when a man on a motorcycle ran her over in a hit-and-run which put and end to her dancing career forcing her to teach. Back at Candice's apartment, she gets a phone call from Phil, a local talent agent (Lucio Fulci), who has made a background check for her on George and informs her that he once had an affair with a young girl who later died. Back at the studio, Candice is attacked by Margie, using the killers M.O., but stops short from killing her, and is then subdued by Dick who turns her over to the police.
A few days later, Jill, another dancer, baby-sits for the wheelchair bound Molly, who takes pictures of her. When Jill answers a knock on the front door, the killer barges into the apartment and stabs her with the hairpin. Molly frantically snaps away, but does not get a clear view of the killer's face. The police arrest Dick when he's found running away, in which he tells them that he only found Jill dead. The following night, the killer attacks and kills Gloria in the locker room in the same manner.
At George's hotel room, Candice lets herself in and finds a hairpin and bottle of chloroform in his drawer. Candice rushes out to her car and drives away. George arrives and seeing what Candice found, tries to call her at her apartment, but she is not home. At the police station, Candice tells Borges of her discovery and that George is the killer and names the hotel where he is staying at. Candice then goes over to the academy which is closed down for the night, and finds Gloria dead in the locker room. She calls Borges and tells her to meet her at the academy.
Candice runs to the manager's room and George is there. He turns on the music and a video showing all the dancers who have been killed. George walks in with the hairpin and asks if it is evidence that she planted in his hotel room to connect him to the murders. Candice then reveals that she's known from the very start that it was he who was the hit-and-run motorcycle rider who ran her over, and ruined her career. She tells him that she killed all those dancers out of jealousy of their rising careers, while planning to frame him for the killings as her final act of revenge against him. She pulls on George's pin-holding hand and impales herself on it, and falls to the floor dead. Borges and Davis arrive on the scene where they know that George is not the killer. When they saw the photo slide Molly took of the killer's jacket, they noticed that the buttons on the killer's jacket were on the left side, which implemented to be a woman's jacket. Plus, Candice told them about the lion's head hair pin needled used in the killings, information that was not made public. George leaves the scene with Borges as the cops investigate the scene. Relieved, but guilt-ridden over having destroyed Candice's dancing ambitions, George begins to confess to Borges about the hit-and-run accident years ago which he blames for destroying Candice's dancing career and making her go on this murderous rampage.
Quote from John Hudson in 'The Asphalt Jungle': "Often crime is a distorted form of human endeavor."
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content