Have you checked the error.log of your server to see if there are any error conditions raised while it ran?

The only way i can see it not returning the print "<p><b>Name</b> -- $name<br><b>Email</b> -- $email<br><b>Comments</b> -- $comments<br>"; contents is if the cgi process terminated wit an error before reaching that point, like dieing because it cannot open the file.

To catch what would otherwise be a terminal error you can wrap the code in an eval block like so

     eval { 
          open (OUTFILE,">$upload_folder/$upload") or die $!;;
          binmode OUTFILE;
          while (<$upload_file>) {
              print OUTFILE;
          }
         close OUTFILE; 
         }; 
     print 'error:'.$@.'<br>' if $@;
[download]

the point made by pojabout use CGI::Carp 'fatalsToBrowser'; may serve to do the same thing. Or it may identify another error

ps, what do you think should be in $upload_file? what parm has the same name as of one of the files to be uploaded, not the value, its name.

consider

my @files = $q->param('multi_files');
my @io_handles=$q->upload('multi_files');

foreach my $upload(@files){
    print "Upload this please -- $upload<br>";
    my $upload_file  = shift @io_handles; 
    if ($upload_file){
        eval { 
          open (OUTFILE,">$upload_folder/$upload") or die $!;;
          binmode OUTFILE;
          while ( my $bytesread = $upload_file->read($buffer,1024) ) {
            print OUTFILE $buffer;
          }
          close OUTFILE; 
       }; 
     print 'error:'.$@.'<br>' if $@; 
    }
    else {
        print "<b>Guess it's broken</b><br/>";
    }
}
[download]

see http://search.cpan.org/~leejo/CGI-4.35/lib/CGI.pod#Processing_a_file_upload_field

you may also be interested in

my $type       = $q->uploadInfo( $upload_file )->{'Content-Type'};
[download]

To determine if you need binmode and should use read, or if you dont want binmode and can use <$upload_file>