HUGH Hefner thinks he could have done a better job of turning his life into a TV movie than the unauthorized biopic he saw last week on a review tape.

“There’s not a lot of depth of character in the film,” says the founder of Playboy magazine, “but it’s entertaining.”

“Hefner light,” is what he calls the USA Network movie “Hefner Unauthorized,” that is slated to air on cable next month.

Hefner is particularly unhappy over the way the film portrays his deceased secretary, Bobbie Arnstein.

“It’s certainly not fair to her,” Hefner told The Post.

The film is narrated by Arnstein (played on TV by Natasha Gregson Wagner) from the grave, a notion that Hefner calls “fanciful.”

Arnstein killed herself with a drug overdose in 1975.

At the time, the former assistant — who’d pleaded guilty to drug charges — was under legal pressure to implicate Hefner (played by Randall Batinkoff), in alleged drug dealing.

The ensuing scandal inspired one writer to dub Arnstein “the girl who died for Playboy.”

“If one is going to raise a serious question at all about this film it is that Bobbie is used as a voice-over narration for my life and does not speak to the real tragedy — that she was not guilty,” Hefner said.

“That outrage, which is contained in her suicide note — and which was very evident during the weeks prior to her suicide — is clearly what she really had on her mind,” Hefner said.

“But in this movie that’s not the focus.”

Hefner, who said he watched the movie last week “in bed with my girlfriends,” almost sued USA earlier this year because the network did not pay for the rights to create a movie about him.

He later backed down from the confrontation soon after the network’s lawyers argued that Playboy and Hefner are “so well-known that we’ve become public domain,” he said.

Hefner’s displeasure stemmed at least as much from the fact that USA is dramatizing his life without paying him for it as it is from the obvious liberties they are taking with the story.

“What they mean by ‘Hefner Unauthorized’ is that it is something that they didn’t pay for,” Hefner said.

“I think it is kind of a broad-strokes sketch,” he said. “The title suggests that it is some kind of an attack, and it’s not that at all.”

USA Network officials were unavailable to talk about the biopic, which airs Dec. 12.

The film is the first of a slew of Playboy-themed films and will also compete with a number of authorized theatrical and TV projects about different aspects of the Hefner empire that are in development.

Included in those is a film from Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment.

“This film is not to be confused with the big-budget film the [producers] Brian Grazer and Ron Howard are making,” Hefner said.