"My family's always been in meat."

Sometimes when I'm searching for movies to tell you about I stumble on one so notorious it requires no review, a film about which so much has been said over the last four decades, anything I try to add to the conversation would be superfluous.

That generally doesn't stop me from talking about it, though. The news here is the movie is available.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

You probably already know the story to this 1974 Tobe Hooper classic: a forgotten, white, working-class family have lost their jobs to automation in their chosen trade, and The Old Man (Jim Siedow) has to run a convenience store off the side of the road selling BBQ and gasoline, except he has no gasoline.

During their funemployment, the boys become quite the artists, dabbling in sculpture, photography, mask-making, you know, stuff they can do with dead bodies to keep them busy between murdering van loads of lost hippies.

Marilyn Burns stars as Sally, whose nipples protrude through her light blue sweater vest the entire film. A lot of critics fail to point out how well she fills out a pair of white, hip-hugging bell-bottoms.

Sally and her whiny, wheelchair-bound brother Franklin ( Paul A. Partain) have invited a few friends on a road trip in the Texas scrub land to find their late grandfather's house. They run out of gas and stumble upon the family of redneck cannibals and the worst kind of culture war ensues.

Gunnar Hansen turns in an iconic performance as Leatherface, the lumbering, mentally-challenged, masked necrophiliac who wields the chainsaw, but all the bad guys are fantastic.

This movie contributed a lot to the lexicon of modern horror, most notably the chainsaw as a tool of violent mayhem.

Roger Ebert called it "some kind of weird, off-the-wall achievement."  It's been often imitated, never duplicated. If you haven't seen it, it's time. If you have seen it, it's time to see it again.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre streams on Amazon Prime, as does the documentary Texas Chain Saw Massacre: A Family Portrait for you trivia buffs.