the average length was 89.8 minutes, with a range between 86 and 94. These films could turn a tidy profit. The first New World release, the biker movie Angels Die Hard, cost $117,000 to produce. It was no Easy Rider, but its box-office take of $2 million–plus meant a 46 percent return for New World's investors. In addition to the start-ups, the growth of exploitation in the 1970s also involved the leading studio in the low-budget field. In 1973, American International gave a shot to director Brian De Palma, whose previous movie, a Warner Bros. comedy, had flopped badly. Reviewing Sisters, De Palma's first horror film, New Yorker critic Pauline Kael observed that its "limp technique doesn't seem to matter to the people who want their gratuitous gore. The movie supplies it, but why is there so much gratuitous dumbness too?... [H]e can't get two people talking in order to make a simple expository point without its sounding like the drabbest Republic picture of 1938." Many examples of the so-called blaxploitation genre of the early and middle part of the decade, featuring stereotype-filled stories revolving around drugs, violent crime, and prostitution, were the product of AIP. One of blaxploitation's biggest stars was Pam Grier, who began her film career with a bit part in Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) and who had appeared in several New World pictures, including The Big Doll House (1971) and The Big Bird Cage (1972), both directed by Jack Hill. Hill also directed her best-known performances, in two AIP blaxploitation films: Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974). Blaxploitation was the first exploitation genre to picked up by the major studios in a substantial way. Indeed, the United Artists release Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), directed by Ossie Davis, is seen as the first significant film of the type. Crossing over before the genre had even gotten established, Laurence Merrick's micro-budget independent The Black Angels (a.k.a. Black Bikers from Hell; 1970) followed by a few months. But the movie regarded as truly igniting the blaxploitation phenomenon, again completely independent, came the following year: Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is also perhaps the most outrageous example of the form—wildly experimental in style, borderline pornographic ("Rated X by an All White Jury," declared the ads), and essentially a manifesto for a black American revolution. Melvin Van Peebles wrote, co-produced, directed, starred in, edited, and composed