Dead Men's Cards, the competent feature debut of James Marquand (son of the late Richard Marquand, director of Jagged Edge and Return of the Jedi), also takes place in and around a sleazy nightclub, but it's a very different kind of movie. This dark British gangster picture takes us to parts of Liverpool not included on the official itinerary for visitors to the European Capital of Culture, and its central character is a washed-up heavyweight boxer who gets a job as a bouncer at a club run by a western-fixated Billy the Cowboy (the late Liverpudlian actor Tom Bell). Billy runs his place as if it were a frontier saloon, and the film's title comes from the poker hand (aces and eights) that Wild Bill Hickok held when he was gunned down in Deadwood in 1876.

The movie is dominated by Paul Barber (the black Liverpudlian who made such an impression in The Full Monty) as a tough ex-soldier working as Billy's chief bouncer, a man of rugged probity who hates drug-dealers. It turns into a Merseyside version of Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo when the club is threatened by the biggest criminal fish in the Pool, and Barber assumes the John Wayne role.