Thanks, Jude. I'm doing it correctly--the way you described--by creating subclips from in/out points of full movie loaded into viewer.
So if you take a look at my screen shot you'll see what I'm talking about. As you can see, the keyframe overlay and the speed ramp line in the motion tab are not reflective of each other. Now here's the really bizarre thing. If I alter that flatline up or down, it starts whizzing through the full feature at blazing speed in forward or reverse depending on which way I tweak the line. This seems super glitchy to me, can't be behaving right. Going to try to recapture the subclip and see if that fixes it. I'll report back with my findings.
UPDATE: D'OH!!
I figured it out. I removed subclip limits on the ones I was experiencing this issue with. All is right again.