Apparently the real answer is just call stat on a path to the directory (not on a directory handle as many examples would have you believe) (at least for windows).
example:
my $directory = "C:\\windows";
my @stats = stat $directory;
my $modifiedTime = $stats[9];
if you want to convert it to localtime you can do:
my $modifiedTime = localtime $stats[9];
if you want to do it all in one line you can do:
my $modifiedTime = localtime((stat("C:\\Windows"))[9]);
On a side note, the Win32 UTCFileTime perl module has a syntax error which prevents the perl module from being interpreted/compiled properly. Which means when it's included in a perl script, that script also won't work properly. When I merge over all the actual code that does anything into my script and retry it, Perl eventually runs out of memory and execution halts. Either way there's the answer above.