Double Denim: Blood Protocol — Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

Before there was a protocol, there was denim. Double Denim: Blood Protocol is the sort of 1980s action film that opens with a helicopter crossing a blood-red sunset and does not consider slowing down until three warehouses, a speedboat and most of the municipal police fleet have been written off.

The film pairs action-movie royalty Rex Vortex and Chuck Bronkle as two cops the department cannot control, suspend or insure. Vortex is all mirrored sunglasses, precision kicks and beautifully delivered threats. Bronkle is a moustache attached to a demolition order. The script insists they are opposites. The property-damage report suggests otherwise.

Its soundtrack understands the assignment completely. This is not background music. It is twelve tracks of chrome-plated hard rock, gated drums and synthesiser warnings designed to make every corridor feel like the final approach to an illegal weapons facility.

Iron Hand supply the record’s heaviest artillery. Their contribution arrives with a riff that sounds as though it was tested on military hardware, then builds into the kind of chorus heard while Vortex re-enters a burning building against direct medical advice. It is enormous, humourless and absolutely correct.

Kick Axe bring the speed. Their hit tears through the middle of the album like Bronkle driving a stolen superbike through a fruit market: bright guitars, reckless momentum and a vocal apparently recorded while hanging from a helicopter’s landing skid. Subtlety was offered a speaking role but died during principal photography.

Between them sit ominous electronic cues, a mandatory power ballad, several guitar solos that begin before the emotional conversation has finished, and a title theme that treats the words “Blood Protocol” as both a classified order and a perfectly reasonable thing for two cops to shout from the roof of a moving train.

The clever thing is that nobody winks. Vortex and Bronkle play every ridiculous scene as though the fate of the free world depends on their next one-liner, and the bands meet them with exactly the same conviction. What should be a novelty compilation becomes a brutally efficient action soundtrack.

MERINGUE! asked the studio whether the rumours of a sequel were true.

They sent us a VHS labelled EVIDENCE — DO NOT DUPLICATE.

It contained a home-recorded episode of Gardener’s World and nine seconds of two men arguing over who got to say the catchphrase.