''Lake Placid'' marketing hits the beach

Promo item of the week: the Lake Placid beach towel. Sure, marketing a thriller about a giant man-eating crocodile (oh yeah, Bridget Fonda and Bill Pullman are in it too) is no easy feat, but the folks at Fox seemed to relish the task — a bit too much, if you ask us. The towel sent to the media shows a swimmer — with a nutritional-data box tattooed on his back. We may be having a Hannibal Lecter moment here, but would the meat from an adult male really contain 23,450 calories and 9,000 milligrams of fat? Unlikely. ''We did try and get the exact nutritional info for a 180-pound human,'' says Fox rep Jackie Sigmund. ''But the cannibal farm in North Carolina would not return calls.''