Seventeen kids from the same third-grade class go missing one night in this stuper-natural horror film they should have called Children of the Dumbed.

Weapons opens with a child (presumably the screenwriter) claiming it to be a true story, even though it is neither true nor a story. The only pertinent plot points are the kids disappearing after a clown lady (Amy Madigan) moves into town. But Sam Raimi wannabe Zach Cregger stretches this over two tedious hours, showing the same non-events from multiple perspectives. Presumably he thinks this resembles Pulp Fiction, but beneath all the clown makeup it’s more like Bozo Unchained.

The movie appears to be set in the same universe as last year’s Longlegs, where nobody suspects the clown-faced child killer of killing the children in a town whose children keep being killed. And despite everyone’s apparent desperation to discover what made the kids go missing (probably the same thing that made the story and characters disappear), nobody thinks to ask the one child in the class who didn’t go missing, and whose parents are suddenly incapacitated. Maybe see if there have been any major changes in his life lately, like a woman dressed as a clown moving in and claiming to be his aunt. I’m no detective but that seems worth looking into.

These are not minor plot holes to explain away with the wave of a magic stick (there is a magic stick by the way) but the mark of a lazy filmmaker hoping the audience is too fatigued by the pretentious build-up to see the outcome as anything other than 17th-century misogyny dressed up in a clown costume.