The problem here is that open has a prototype, so it puts the @$_ in scalar context instead of interpolating it into the argument list.

For normal routines that can be circumvented by calling it with an ampersand, &yourroutine(@$_). Unfortunately I don't know how that works with open, neither &CORE::open(@$_) nor &open(@$_) work.

Perl 6 solves this problem by introducing a new syntax for explicitly interpolating arrays and hashes into argument lists, there it would be spelled open |@argumentlist.