PM/Jeff Speakman Collaboration

Land Of The Free (1998) ½*

Cast: Jeff Speakman, William Shatner, Chris Lemmon, John Furey, Lisa Darr

Directed by Jerry Jameson

Jeff Speakman and William Shatner star in what is no doubt the worst movies of their careers, an extremely lifeless and predictable man hunt styled action flick where Jeff Speakman and his family are targeted by corrupt politician William Shatner due to Speakman’s knowledge of corruption and as you can imagine the film is just painful to sit through, a type of movie you don’t watch so much as you endure. Indeed Land Of The Free is such an annoyingly banal standard issue action flick that it fades into background noise. Even the promise of entertainment in the performance of Shatner is lost due to the fact that the film isn’t made with enough energy to be even lousy in a fun way. Land Of The Free is the worst type of movie a writer fears, the type that can kill one’s will to write. In fact this film is bad enough to kill one’s will to live. It should be noted that the action sequences are extremely boring and derivative and that Jeff Speakman doesn’t even do any martial arts. Land Of The Free is just a painful movie, I mean absolutely painful to endure, the movie just keeps going around in predictable circles and you just sit back wishing that someone would either put  you or the film out of its misery. I don’t want to sound like I’m making it sound funny, this filmhurts to watch. It’s dreary, incompetent and made with the all the flair of a dying tapeworm. Indeed you don’t know what true freedom is, until you see the end credits.

Running Red (1999) *

Cast: Jeff Speakman, Angie Everhart, Stanley Kamel

Directed by Jerry P. Jacobs



Jeff Speakman stars as a Russian soldier who defected (Speakman thankfully doesn’t even attempt a Russian accent) only to be pulled back into the world of espionage when people of his past threaten him and his wife (Everhart) in a mindless and mundane conspiracy flavored action flick. The action sequences are actually few and far between, in that you only have the big fight sequence at the end and in the beginning and everything else is just filler for dreary nothingness this film calls a story. The climax rips off the action sequence from Red Heat in that it takes the actual footage and uses it, but aside from the humor of seeing the filmmakers fail in their attempt to cover their tracks, Running Red is the anti-thesis of entertainment. Indeed you wonder when you see a movie this dreary, in that you can tell it failed to interest the two lead actors as well as how much the movie is bored with itself, you wonder why they even bothered committing this to celluloid. Indeed Running Red on all levels has been done before and almost always better.  Without any real action or indeed any attempt to make the film interesting fans of Jeff Speakman can only be disappointed with this dud, while others will be bored to tears.