Coverage of G-FEST 2026 Concludes…
Sunday, July 12th, 2026 7 am – I wake up, pack my things, and start loading the car. No breakfast buffet today; just protein bars, and we all get our rooms in order and prepare for the final day of G-FEST 2026.
8:50 am – We all head downstairs to attend a panel only to discover that it’s been canceled. Dejected, we head downstairs to see who won the model contest.
G-FEST 2026 Coverage Continues…
6 am Saturday, July 11th, 2026 – My three sons and I go downstairs for the hotel breakfast buffet and are the first ones there. We know it won’t be long before there’s a line to get in this place (and we weren’t wrong). The subject of G-FEST may be Godzilla, but the crowd it attracts is the real monster.
I now interrupt my G-FEST (Godzilla Festival) diaries for an interlude on the event’s model room. This has always been one of my favorite aspects of the weekend. There was one year when I actually participated in this contest and won “People’s Choice.” It was my first model and depicted Biollante. I used the wrong type of glue and the wrong paint (this was obviously pre-YouTube), and it looked terrible. Not wanting my kids to think I was a quitter, I ran to the Michaels craft store and bought a bunch of fake plants and Sculpey clay. I then proceeded to cover up and embellish the mess I made. How it won anything is still a mystery, but one thing is for certain – it could never compete with this year’s selections, which were absolutely unbelievable.
G-FEST 2026 coverage continues…
6:15 am Friday, July 10th 2026 – My son, Luke, and I wake up and get ready for the first official day of G-FEST (Godzilla Festival) 2026. One of the hotel’s house channels is playing Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris (1999), a pretty good kaiju film, and we each watch snippets while the other gets ready.
6:40 am – We head downstairs for the Hyatt Regency O’Hare’s breakfast buffet. The buffet is $25 per person, but we learned that the best way to conquer a full day at G-FEST is to indulge in a “lumberjack” breakfast since we always skip lunch. The food is decent, and they have a chef on hand who will make you an omelet on request. My only gripe is that they used to have really tasty pork sausage links but have since replaced them with chicken sausage, which tastes horrible!
Last weekend, I attended my first Chicago All Monsters Attack convention, an offshoot of Days of the Dead. This made perfect sense because I’ve seen fewer days as dead as this one. The show was at the Crowne Plaza in Rosemont (right across the street from my last adventure, Nightmare Weekend), which coincidentally used to host the similarly themed G-FEST (Godzilla Festival). After attending G-FEST for over twenty years, my eldest son, Alex, and I were curious how they’d compare.
Last night I attended an early screening of Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One. Despite Godzilla’s recent American films and Monarch series on Apple Plus, TOHO Studios has returned to its signature IP for the first time since the acclaimed Shin Godzilla in 2016. Although I’d heard positive feedback from its Japanese debut nearly a month ago, I was ill-prepared for just how good it actually was.
Terror from Beyond the Dave 