I still don’t understand why Ami Canaan Mann‘s forthcoming Texas Killing Fields (Anchor Bay Films, 10.7), which will play the Venice Film Festival later this month (or in very early September), doesn’t have a website up. Or why Anchor Bay doesn’t at least include basic information and promotional art for the film on its website. They need to get on the stick.

For whatever reason Texas Killing Fields won’t be playing the Toronto Film Festival or any other festival besides Venice. Don’t dark policiers of this sort need the critics to rally round?

I reported a while back that it’s about the Texas I-45 Murders, a series of unsolved killings of prostitutes and lonely girls in the ’80s, probably by more than one assailant, in a blighted area south of Houston near Interstate I-45, which runs from Dallas down to Galveston Bay.

Mann, director of an earlier feature called Morning, is the daughter of Michael Mann, who produced this Zodiac-resembling crime drama. Texas Killing Fields costars Sam Worthington, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Chloe Moretz, Stephen Graham, Jessica Chastain and Annabeth Gish.

Two years ago Danny Boyle was planning to direct it before he bailed in fall ’09 to make 127 Hours, but not before calling the script “almost too dark to get made.”

Deadline‘s Michael Fleming reported on 2.7.10 that Don Ferrarone‘s script is “a true story of a pair of detectives investigating [the] murders in a stretch of bayous near the oil refineries in coastal Texas where as many as 70 bodies have turned up over the past 30 years.”