What can I tell you about “The Cabin in the Woods” without giving its secrets away? It’s more a question of all the things I can’t tell you, since this is one of those movies that makes a reviewer earn his peanuts by weighing every word for spoiler content. Let’s just say that if you like smartly twisted spins on worn-out horror cliches and if you have a strong stomach for flying body parts, put down the newspaper/laptop and go — we’ll talk later.

For those of you still reading, I can at least spill the beans about the movie’s first 15 minutes. We see the crew of college kids — all suspiciously long in the tooth for undergraduates, but never mind — piling into the RV for a wild weekend out in the country. There’s the loose blonde, Julie (Anna Hutchison); her jock boyfriend, Kurt Curt (Chris Hemsworth, “Thor”); the sensitive hunk, Holden (Jesse Williams); the stoner comic relief, Marty (Fran Kranz); and of course, the “final girl,” the virgin, Dana (Kristen Connolly). She’s not technically a virgin, but in the words of one character, “we work with what we have.”

Off they go toward certain carnage, but wait — who are those government drones in white lab coats monitoring their every move? Why is there brisk office betting on the outcome? How did actors as arch as Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford find their way into this movie?

“The Cabin in the Woods” is directed by Drew Goddard, who wrote the droll monster-movie rehash “Cloverfield,” and it is co-written by him and Joss Whedon, mastermind of cult pop properties like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and the “Firefly”/”Serenity” franchise. Clever boys, and the film balances its eek-eek-eek with a larger, darker, more enjoyably ridiculous premise that gets revealed with the finesse of an old-school striptease. Even when you figure out where the movie’s going, the ride’s still worth taking.