The apex of Hammer's Dracula movies

After this marvelous cinematographic tour-de-force from Freddie Francis it was all down hill after this one. The next one Taste the Blood of Dracula has some good moments but eventually the story becomes muddled. The ending in the church is nice but you kind of get the sense that Hammer was making the Count too much of a wuss. The following flick Scars of Dracula had some potential but again they miss the mark. Rubber bat BS, yet another different Castle Dracula, a vampiress the Count stabs to death (?) in a jealous tantrum and these Hammer dip s h i t s even let Christopher Lee recite some old lines of dialogue from the first 1958 Dracula movie and the final two Alan Gibson travesties are a sad conclusion to the Hammer Dracula series. Dracula Today's conclusion has Dracula firing some terrific lines of dialogue at Peterr Cushing's Van Helsing but the whole deal is ludicrous casting Peter Cushing as his character's own descendant, stupid. And the opening is even more stupid impaling the Count on a coach wheel spoke, the final confrontation, we're told, between the demon-vampire Dracula and the intrepid Van Helsing. Demon-vampire, a great term used in a lousy movie. Bad enough that Hammer always had so little regard for the visual continuity of their Dracula and Frankenstein movies but to actually compromise the chronological continuity is going too far. The narrator tells us this final Dracula-Van Helsing battle takes place in 1872 and a hundred years later we have the mod going-on in 1972 London. Didn't director Alan Gibson ever view the first Hammer Dracula film from 1958? That movie opens with Jonathan Harker (John Van Eyssen) writing an entry into his diary and the year is 1885!...not to mention we see a coffin lid in Dracula Has Risen From The Grave with the year 1909 on it. So chronologically these Hammer stupes were all over the place.